


Ghost Story

by drawlight



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Jane Eyre Fusion, Angst, Canon Compliant, Drama, First Time, M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, POV Severus Snape, Pining, Romance, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-24 12:44:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17100827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: All love stories are ghost stories; Severus Snape has seen a ghost.After the war, Severus Snape takes a position as a tutor at a strange house in Cornwall with a stranger master.





	Ghost Story

**Author's Note:**

> To JK Rowling, for creating these monsters.  
> To Charlotte Bronte, for giving them a home.  
> To the many, many authors I have quoted. _Loved, lauded, left out._

When he would consider telling this story, years later, he wasn't sure where to begin. Usually, he chose to start here, where the world had shifted. _The past,_ after all, _is prologue._

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Part I:  
** **All Love Stories Are Ghost Stories**  
  
_Here, where the world is quiet;_  
_Here, where all trouble seems_  
_Dead winds' and spent waves' riot_  
_In doubtful dreams of dreams;_  
_I watch the green field growing_  
_For reaping folk and sowing,_  
_For harvest-time and mowing,_  
_A sleepy world of streams._  
Algernon Charles Swinburne  
The Garden of Proserpine

_September 2008_  
_Cokeworth_

It feels like being underwater.

He is in the abyssal deep, where the inky cobalts fade into violets and blacks. Sound is muted and delayed, as it passes through meters of pressurized water, before vibrating into his eardrums. He sees things a beat too late, residual images from a past moment. He is only a reaction to the world around him. He is nothingness, a vacuum. (He must be, for nothingness is safe. Nothingness is made to absorb the detonation of a bomb. He absorbs waves and energy, light and color. He does not emit. He says nothing, gives nothing. The world is silent here.)

He has been picking at his cuticles again. It was an old nervous habit that his mother had disdained (“Nasty”, she had said. “Common,” she had said.). While people had always given him a wide berth in public, now it seems more out of a sense of revulsion rather than fear. He’s lost weight and the bones of his body jut out at severe angles like a postmodernist building. The bags under his eyes are dangerously entering checked luggage territory and his hair, never much to speak of, lay greasier and lanker about his face in serpentine clumps. On these increasingly infrequent trips to Diagon Alley, Severus Snape limits his dealings to those merchants with whom he’d had accounts for decades. It was easier to avoid introductions and the slow horror in their eyes as they realized his name. The Order of Merlin (Second Class) that the Ministry had grudgingly awarded him hadn’t done much to erase the word _traitor_ in most of the world’s eyes. His boots click on the old, age-smoothed cobblestones and a witch pulls her child in closer to her. He closes his eyes, his mouth set in a grim firm line, and reshouldered the bag of boomslang skin and distilled nightshade tincture. _Miserable hag._ His shoulders ache; his feet are sore. The visit had been brief yet he already feels the exhaustion burrowing into his bones like a cancer. There is the slow build of a headache just beyond his temples. His stomach rumbles. He’d forgotten to eat anything that morning save a small tin of mandarin oranges. Their bright flavor had burst on his tongue against the grey Yorkshire sky.

He tucks into a corner between the dilapidated front of Ollivander’s old shop and a small coffee parlor to Apparate. It had been a long day. They were all long days. He steps into the small kitchen and set the bags on the pockmarked kitchen table. From the front of the _Daily Prophet_ , Harry Potter’s sullen and beaten seventeen-year-old face stares out at him, defiantly raising his chin in a refusal to speak. The headline reads _Death Eater Activity In East Anglia?_ Severus traces a long finger across the type, watching the sweat glisten on Potter’s brow. He knows Harry Potter won’t speak. He knows that particularly infamous picture will not do more than glare. He knows because that photo has been published every week for the past ten years. There were no new photos; Harry Potter was dead.

The world had ended on a Saturday. He had always wondered how it might go, idly at first and then with increasing surety as the time drew near. It seemed fitting that the War would culminate with Potter's final year. It had raged in like a bull during Taurus season. It was oddly poetic (not that the blasted brat would have picked up on the dramatic foreshadowing). Like all educated wizards, Severus was familiar with physics, which governed all worlds wizarding and Muggle alike. However, he had forgotten a core concept in his fervent prayer for the end times - that the Universe would end and then snap back, ready to start anew. So, like all bad luck, fate wasn’t content to let him perish with the War. Instead, the world was reborn on a Sunday and everything went wrong. After it all, really, he hadn't expected to survive. Secretly, he would have bet his life that (regardless of respect for the severity of the threat) Harry Potter would triumph once again. Damn it, after all, he was the Boy Who _Lived_.

That is until he didn't. The world had gotten it all wrong. He had carried Potter’s body. The boy’s skin had been cold already but his wounds had been scorching (hot as stars) where the blood poured out. He remembers almost nothing through the haze of hypovolemic shock. Later, as Poppy administered antivenin and recited his injuries (superficial gash to the left carotid artery by that vile snake, broken leg, stab to the right side of his abdomen) he would wonder how exactly he had managed to gather the boy’s ravaged, battered corpse and crawl over the broken glass on the shattered floor of the Shrieking Shack to Hogwarts. (He had marveled that the wards still accepted him into the school, had deposited Potter onto the flagstones of the Entrance Hall, Potter’s blood and vomit still stuck beneath his fingernails, and fainted into a rich black nothingness.) By the time he had come to in the Infirmary, Potter was infuriatingly dead. Poppy had patched Severus’ wounds and performed a cleaning charm on himself and his clothes. But his scarf, which had fallen off in the tangle and kicked under a suit of armor in the Hall, remained stiff and caked with blood. (He wonders who had been with the boy when he died. Had the dark rushed in like a wave? Had Potter been scared? He was only a boy.)

_Goddammit, Potter._

Severus will never admit aloud that the world is a dimmer place without Potter. It is battered and torn. There is relief in the way a wound ached. The initial pain has passed but the residual, the aching - it lingers on like an old scar that (like his bad knee) throbs when the rains come. So many had died, had been wounded, lost things, lost friends, lost family. There are few left to protest his innocence, not that at this point he cares. The funeral had been a spectacle. Throngs drawn by the boy’s morbid fame had pressed in against the mortuary chapel’s Byzantine ediface. _Look at you, you miserable vultures. You make me sick._ He’d stayed near the back of the mass of the bereaved and prepared a scathing retort for any unfortunate sort who dared ask him why he had come. No one did. Instead, Severus had pulled the black robe tighter around him, the threadbare scarf, and asked himself the very same question. _Why are you here, Severus? What possible thing could you hope to accomplish by making a fool of yourself?_ The scarf was black and betrayed nothing; he had not yet washed Potter’s blood from it. He was a maudlin old fool. He had stared at the dark casket and barely registered any words of the service. It didn’t matter; nothing mattered. He left before the boy’s body was interred. Something about watching Potter descend below ground, past him to Sheol, to Hades, to where Severus was not, would have broken even a better man. (There would be no rest for his nerves in the intervening years; Potter’s battle-gloried face would grace the _Daily Prophet_ weekly. Still heroic and good-looking though bloodstained and bruised, his heavy-lidded eyes and grim mouth steady in their stubborn silence.)

He had counted on dying. Potter had even bested him at that. That detestable child. _You beautiful fool._

And yet, here he is. Forty-eight years old with a blackened reputation and a bum leg seeking to eke out his remaining years among Muggles and those places where he was not known. ( _Fuck my godforsaken name. Better to go somewhere where no one has ever heard it._ ) He'd had little savings prior to his unceremonious departure from Hogwarts and the tutoring employment advertisement placed in _The Globe_ looks tempting. The idea to apply had come so suddenly that he had jumped and spilled a bit of Balinson’s Bergamot Blast onto the paper, the tea stain spread out into a curious likeness of Australia. It is a Muggle post, teaching basics to an adolescent. And it is, most attractively, incredibly far from Scotland. Really, it is as far as he can feasibly manage in Britain. Despite his relatively cleared (singed, scorch-marked) name, the Wizengamot had limited his freedom following the trials and restricted him to living within British territories. _Oh, you're a free man within these borders._ He picks at the faded Dark Mark on his inner arm. He'd expected it to fade away completely when the Dark Lord fell. But still, like all scars, it lingers on. _It doesn’t matter,_ he thinks, rubbing one long hand over his stubble (he had forgotten to perform his shaving charm again). _Nothing matters._

He stares at the kitchen sink. Unwelcome memories surface. (Once, when he was eleven, Mama had stood there, at that sink, had showed him how to peel a tomato. She had scored the bottom and dropped it into boiling water, taken the paring knife and, like flesh, had peeled away the protective skin to the pulp below. The knife had slipped and cut her finger at the knuckle. She had held the digit in her mouth, sucking the blood off. That had been the first time he had been aware of the separateness of their destinies, of his parents’ mortality. He knew it deeper now; he shares a destiny with no one.)

Long, dead strands of grass scratch at the windows. He glances again at the employment advertisement. The idea isn’t a terrible one. It has to be better than staying here and existing on the margins as unwelcome as a spider.

 

* * *

 

So Severus Snape packed his meager belongings and departed for Cornwall. He knew little of the house nor his new employer. The housekeeper, Ida, had corresponded with him mainly over email (which he'd learned to navigate despite his misgivings) and he'd had no contact with his actual employer, one Mr. John Hawthorne of Reichenbach Hall. He knew that the house was large and isolated. Public records showed that Hawthorne had purchased it a decade ago, (in cash, he noted) and had fixed it up some. The name itself, Reichenbach, was new. Severus figured that the man must be a romantic of sorts to choose a name like that. Hawthorne himself had had little presence and few records beyond the sale of the house. In fact, curiously, it almost seemed as if he had not existed prior to that time and had carefully limited his presence since. There was a single photo of him from a few years prior that had surfaced on his internet search. It showed a man of middle height, plain of both face and dress. In the picture the man stood half in shadow, leaving his face almost, if you glanced too quickly, to appear masked.

Cornwall, he decides, would agree with him. It is growing late and the mists spread out over the ground, thread through the grasses, twist up into the dusk. Some measure of him appreciates the wayward situation of the Hall, out here on the north coast where the cliffs were wild and dangerous. He could feel the isolation of the place curling into him with bony, greedy fingers. The villagers of nearby Tintagel had given him very odd glances when he’d requested a driver, none too eager to volunteer.

"Reichenbach Hall, eh?" The driver asks. (It had taken a few extra pounds to convince the man to drive him up here at dusk, despite it being relatively close.) Severus grunts his assent. _Stop talking, you pastoral wanker._ "Glad it's you and not me." The driver continues, "Wouldn't want to be stayin' up there after dark." Severus raises an eyebrow. "Everyone knows John Hawthorne's into some mad stuff up there. Voodoo, you know. Demons. Nope, ya ain't gonna catch me out up there." The driver leans over, "They say he went mad and killed 'is whole family but no one can prove it. 'E's a charmin' enough chap though. But strange things happen up at the Hall." Severus grunts again and the driver is silent. _Insipid superstitious nonsense._

The old Hall sits back from the road, a curving path twisting up through a knot of dense rowan trees before opening to a wide expanse of the moor. The great country house proves to clearly be centuries old, heavy and grey in the fog. His eyes trace the elaborate and imposing structure, from the heavy stone columns to the Gothic flying buttresses. It seemed to hunch over the wide, sparse field, heavy with disquiet, not unlike an ogre. _Hello, you old monster,_ he thinks. The structure is in sharp relief to the land, old stones that loom with foreboding over the horizon. He cannot truly see the detail of the thing but sees instead how it displaces the dark around it. As they draw closer he notices details emerging from the dusk. The bones of the house are clearly medieval, from the heavy-stoned alures to the remaining bartizan. There are newer pieces fitted to the existing house in more modern styles as if the house was a magpie scavenging throughout the centuries.

The car pulls into a wide circular driveway of white gravel. He takes his small bags from the car's trunk. There wasn't much he'd kept save some clothes. He'd sought out Muggle clothing in order to fit in. The jacket feels strange and light on his shoulders and he shivers in the cool autumn night. It chafes against him with a constant sense of wrongness. He misses his heavy robes. In these, there is little to hide within. The driver slams the trunk shut and pulls away in a hurry, clearly pleased to not stay long.

There is a yellow-orange Tungsten light on over the side entrance by the carriage house. A tall, rounded woman waves to him from the steps. Her grey-brown hair done up in a loose twist, her dress very neatly patched. She takes his bags with a quick motion. "Well, come in, come in. You'll catch your death of cold," she hustles him into the Hall. It is nearly darker within and the walls are illuminated by dim sconces. A taper candle flickers on the low table opposite. He’s mildly surprised to see that the house is lit with candles instead of electric light. It reminds him a bit of Hogwarts and he takes comfort in that.

“You must be Mr. Snape,” she says, her eyes making quick work of him. There is something of Minerva in her and Severus immediately rather likes her in spite of himself.

“Severus Snape,” he says, “yes.”

“We’re so glad you could come so quickly. John was keen to get started.” Her smile is warm and slightly crooked, “I’m Ida MacPatrick. Housekeeper.”

He nods. Her eyes soften, taking in his exhausted appearance, sounding the depths of the wrinkles under his eyes. "Come along then, I'll show you to your room. You've had a long day of travel so I won't keep you." She lifts a lamp and navigates through the twisting corridors. Severus knows that there is little chance that he'll remember his way back. He thinks of Theseus with Ariadne's thread, spiraling deep into the labyrinth. “I apologize that John’s away right now. He’s frequently gone but I expect him back soon. He’ll want to speak with you regarding Jack’s lessons.”

Deep in the recesses of the east wing, the modest room suits him. It is small with a single window facing to the north and simply furnished with an oakwood bed and desk. The walls are a dove grey. There is little in the way of ornamentation, save a single framed etching of a doe done in the style of Durer. He frowns at the unlikely match. _Only a bloody unfortunate coincidence,_ he thinks. "What does the master of the house do to keep him away so long?" He asks.

Ida frowns, "Frankly, I'm not _entirely_ sure. It’s research of some kind but it’s all beyond me. He's away on the Continent or America most of the time." Severus nods. He is intensely curious, of course, of what his absent employer might be like. It was easy enough to imagine if he listened to the tales told in the pub of vampires and werewolves and worse. The townspeople were quite sure that, if Mr. Hawthorne was not a vampire (with a very strong _if_ ), he is at least up to some kind of dark tricks. His frequent absence seems to be welcomed by the town rather than lamented. A strange image rises to his mind of a pale-skinned man laid out in a coffin, blood dripping from his lips and sleeping an unnatural sleep.

"I'm pleased to see he puts so much care into his son's schooling."

Ida laughs and shakes her head, "Oh no, Mr. Snape, Jack isn't his son, he's his ward. The son of a poor woman he met during his travels. I understand they became great friends and he promised to take Jack in and provide for him." Severus nods. He has been curious about the child since learning more of the man as there had been no woman of note. No wives, mistresses, girlfriends ever connected even in passing. She clucks, "Poor thing. French even." Ida hovers in the doorframe, "Will this do?"

"Yes." He says, then forcing himself to ingratiate himself a bit to his host, "Thank you." His words of gratefulness are rusty to his own ears. He pauses, letting his eyes look over the heavy wood furniture, “There is no mistress of the Hall?”

She hesitates for a moment, “No, I’m afraid not. Never has been.” Her mouth twitches a bit in what might be affection. “John, you know. He’s young yet - not as young as he used to be, but still. He’s… a bit wild.” He nods, understanding. Young men must sow their wild oats.

Ida pats his arm, “It’s good that you’re here now, John always demands the best for young Jack." She smiles, “Alright, as I said, I shan’t keep you. I’ll meet you with Jack in the breakfast room at eight-thirty tomorrow morning.” A pause, “We don’t tend to use the formal rooms much when John’s away.”

“I understand,” he says. Ida bids goodnight and leaves, pulling the door shut with a firm click. He sits down on the bed, cloak pooling out from him like rainwater, and smooths his hand over his leg. The right knee is aching again. Pain flushes out from around the joint, snakes up his femur, runs deep into his hip. One hundred billion neurons in the human body and all of them aflame. His creased hand massages the complaining joint lightly. _It will rain soon._

From his window there is a clear view of the small lake. The sight of the Milky Way reflecting on its quieted surface is like placing an oxygen mask over his face. He had grown up on the edges of the deepest lake in Britain (a vestigial scar from the glacier-torn last true ice age) and never feels quite right except when water is near. He does not go close but the sight of the shore calms him. He loves to see where the land met the waves, the delineation of the shoreline, marked as if it were the end of the world. As if it were a physical promise that yes, this too would end. It is as necessary as air; he cannot bear this forever. (His mother had not borne it; she had filled her pockets with stones like Virginia Woolf and walked into the lake, never to be seen again. The Cokeworth police force had dragged it as best as they could but the lake was deep and dark and extended past human knowledge. He knows she is still down there somewhere, where the creatures were bioluminescent and peculiar. It is another world, inverted and surreal. She is there now, he is not.)

Veins, that's where the madness comes from. Filtered down through his mother, through her network of veins and arteries and slowly poured into his own. No one had ever spoken of the madness, of the aunt in the attic, but it is there bubbling up in the back of his mind. It is waiting, patiently, like a monster beneath the bed to grab him and swallow him whole. "When did it start?" the St. Mungo’s healer had asked, but he had then, as he does now, thought of the shifting sands of his own mind, the inability to trust, the small compulsions. When had it not existed? There had never been a point without the madness. (Yes, it had come through his mother’s blood, that he knows. Not from his brutish father, no, but through his mother and her mother before that. Through his grandmother who had grown up on the banks of Lake Snagov, who had come to England at fifteen, who still had held the primeval Carpathian wildness in her dark eyes and dark hair.)

He thinks back to his years at the hovel he called home, that derelict sack of sagging wood and brick he calls Spinner’s End. It has always seemed absurd to him to give it an address, let alone a name. (He had left Hogwarts in disgrace, having only packed a few items in a small valise - clothing, toothbrush, a few books. Minerva had sent his Order of Merlin via owl post a week later. He had tossed it into the fireplace and attempted to burn it. It had bounced back out unharmed. That’s when he realized that the damn thing was charmed to be fireproof.) In the basement of the crumbling small house, the old professor had kept a lab. Long slate countertops had grown busy with flasks and abandoned projects. Knives, half-chopped elfwort, scales. He used to work cleanly, once upon a time, but that had long since passed. There were long weeks with no activity when he brews no potions, only tea. The steam had curled for some time before slowly growing cold. His eyes would dart, hesitating on settling.

There had also been days of ferocity. His hands would fly through the shelves, stir giant cauldrons, squeeze the last drop of contraband unicorn blood from an unmarked bag. Bubble, boil, and burn. His eyes bright, glassy, unfocused. Manic. _For god's sake let this be it. Work, damn you, you cursed fucking concoction. I would burn my fucking heart out._ Once, they had said he was brilliant. Well, naturally. His mind was laid out impeccably. Surgically clean. Here he kept a mental dossier, written like recipe cards. _The Draught of Living Death. Wormswort Reduction._ One file drawer is kept locked. Severus visits it rarely, always in the middle of the night and soaked in firewhiskey. He regrets it after. _Potter, you. Laid out like an autopsy, your eyes look just like hers and like the underside of frogs' bellies and young deadly nightshade. Your skin, that long side of flesh, where your bones join, where your ribs flare out like a fan. Your mouth, open. I wanted to touch you, even then, you monster, how could you?_

 _And so they buried Hector, breaker of horses._ Sometimes, late at night when Severus allows himself to wallow, he considers a parallel world. What if he had died when the snake ravaged his jugular? What if Potter had lived? Had Potter viewed the memories poured out to him like mercury? Would Potter remember him, perhaps learn to understand him, even a bit? (Never, even at his most unmoored, does Severus consider that both men could have survived. No, there was not enough space in the world for both Harry Potter and Severus Snape.)

He crosses the room, sinking slightly into the high pile rug. The uncomplicated decor in the room suits him. He pulls open the door to the simple oak wardrobe and stills. There, deep in the wardrobe shadow’s penumbra is a small dark spot. A shadow darker than the rest. He picks up the small form and turns it over in his hands. It is a swallow, was a swallow, barely the size of his palm. Its chest is torn savagely open, the blood spreading into the red feathers at its breast and contrasting sharply with the long, glossy blue feathers on its back. It is also, curiously, an odd thing to find in this perfectly made up and cleaned room. Perhaps a cat had left it as a macabre welcoming gift? Although, he realizes, it is strange that there is no blood on the floor nor loose feathers to indicate the scene of the crime. He frowns, hoping that this will not become the beginning of a trend.

 _I will speak to Ida about this tomorrow,_ he thinks and then promptly forgets.

 

* * *

 

He quickly settles into his new routine. It takes the better part of a week to fully explore the grounds and rooms of Reichenbach Hall and still he is not entirely convinced that the staircases do not move on their own like those of Hogwarts. As a blessed relief, his young pupil shows himself to be a quiet, studious boy of eight years old. Jack seems to prefer reading to most other pursuits and Severus quickly finds him to be as agreeable as any student he has encountered. He strangely finds himself thinking that perhaps this self-imposed exile may not be as difficult as he’d expected. The domestic staff is small. He meets the few others on the following day. Bobby Chapman, the Estate Manager, is gruff but genial. There are a handful of maids and a cook. Severus is moderately surprised to see such a large house run by a skeleton crew of staff, but he supposes that it is in keeping with Hawthorne’s infrequent visits. He wonders why the man had bothered to purchase the house at all if he chooses to spend so much time away. The strangest of the employees is June, who seems to live and work primarily in the oddly neglected west wing of the house, although her duties are never explained. It didn’t matter, he thinks. He is there to do a specific job. The gossip of the others has no import.

It was a curious place. The Hall itself seemed to have its own personality and he often felt like he needed to whisper to keep the walls from overhearing. It was not a place with kindness. The cold air swept through corridors and hung steadily throughout. He could feel hidden eyes in every corner, though there would be nothing there when a candle was lifted to dispel the shadows. The warmth of the people within stood in sharp contrast to the old superstitious stones and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

There was a clatter of pans beyond the doors leading to the kitchen. A parlour maid runs out, hustled out by Ida with a self-satisfied smirk. She dries her hands on her skirt and looks over at him.

“There - that should settle that,” she says, winking with an impish grin. He raises one black eyebrow in good humor.

“Are you terrorizing the domestic staff, Ms. MacPatrick?”

“Call me Ida, please. And yes, as much as I may,” she laughs, “I try to keep the gossip and idleness at bay. There aren’t many of us here, it’ll do us no good.”

“Hmm,” He hums his approval.

Ida spears him with a sidelong glance, "You seem to be getting along. How do you like Reichenbach, Mr. Snape?"

"It is... remarkable."

She grins, "John will be pleased to hear that. The house is his pride and joy. He came into it about ten years ago and I've been with him ever since. It was built in 1280. She was called Tintagel then, well, not the first Tintagel obviously, which you know the village was named for. But since John’s rebuilt her, he's called her Reichenbach."

"It's an ... odd choice of name." It is an odd name, not in keeping with English country houses. It is German and strange. He tries to picture the man who bestowed the name, a man given to flights of Romantic fancy.

"Isn't it? I asked him about it once but he only said there are some stories best left untold," she shrugs, "He's a strange one sometimes, prone to a bit of melancholy. A good man, certainly - there isn't a better one! But an odd one." She looks over at Severus, a long strange look in her eyes. "I wonder what you'll make of each other." She takes a sip of her sherry. "He asked me a great deal of questions about you. What your qualifications were, your history. And he was very insistent on hiring you. Wouldn't hear of anything else, in fact." He shudders slightly. Such interest in his personal background does not bode well for anyone.

“I see,” he mutters.

“But I’m glad to see you’re settling into the Hall. John likes to keep it a bit old-fashioned. Says it reminds him of his childhood. You can see with the candles and the statues, suits of armor and the like. It was in a complete state when he bought it, so many of the touches are his own.” Severus nods, he agrees privately with Hawthorne’s taste. The Hall is largely stone. It has every modern convenience but the lights are often forgone in favor of oil lamps and candles. It evokes Hogwarts in many ways, sometimes in ways that seem almost deliberate.

His favorite room, of course, is the library. He had been surprised to find such a well-stocked collection. Spines of books line the shelves like a xylophone. It is the library of a reader. Not simply filled with standard bastions of classic literature but delving deeply into specific authors and topics. It is a library that stands out like a thumbprint. Severus almost feels like he is intruding by running his hands along the well-loved books, reading their names and authors aloud, knowing what his employer is interested in. No two collections are the same. Without knowing John Hawthorne’s face or voice, Severus knows that he is a man who loves a grand adventure. The full collection of Jules Verne sits, with gilt-edged pages, on a high shelf. There are a great deal of treatises on religion and the occult by fairly respected, though Muggle, authors. Though the books are always nearly pristine, their spines uncracked and not a page dog-eared, Severus finds receipts strewn like bookmarks throughout and loopy marginalia scribbled in ink.

He does not forget the unsettling feeling that he is never alone. He keeps his wand close, performs several intricate locking and warding charms each evening. Often he hears the sounds of movement, like fabric brushing against fabric. Some nights he hears a strange, high, cruel laugh. (It is odd, he cannot tell if it is coming from within or outside of the house. Sometimes he cannot tell if he heard it at all or if his mind is playing tricks on him. He stares then at the stones, willing them to reveal their secrets to him. They say nothing.)

One Thursday evening he hears a loud crash and again, that horrible, malevolent laughter. He has heard laughter like this before. This is the sound of a madman, the sound of a sadist, of someone who takes pleasure in pain. He rises up to his feet, tangled in sweaty bedclothes and bedsheets (linens like tentacles about his ankles, dragging him to the deep) and pulls the door open. There is a scuffle of movement down at the other end of the dim hallway. Ida sees him and comes, lantern aloft. Her grey hair is wild.

“What the bloody hell happened?”

“It’s June,” Ida says, furrowing her brow, “She has some… problems. Don’t worry, Severus. She’ll be alright. Get some rest. It’ll be alright in the morning.” His expression remains skeptical. She moves away down the hall then pauses and turns, “Lock your door though, please.”

He locks his door and wards it as well.

He sleeps poorly for the remainder of that night in the canopied oak bed and wakes from peculiar dreams several times. When the dawn began to break and creep in through the gaps in the curtains, he wakes fully and lays perfectly still. Still, that was the word. Everything was far too still. _What should I have expected?_ He wonders. The bedrooms were nestled deep to the back of the house, so it would be odd to hear too much movement. Yet, something seemed preternaturally off and far too silent. His skin creeps with a deep sense of wrongness.

 _It’s only June. She’s disturbed,_ he thinks.

 

* * *

 

He steps into the field, his soles already dark with mud. The old goat stares back with beady black eyes. The long grasses tickle his matted wool, brush his mottled balls as he stood ignorant of shame and common decency, and defiant before God. His hindquarters tremble with the unprocessed, unintelligent urge to mount and rut against anything, even a rotted-out old stump. The uneasiness creeps into Severus’ bones as he is reminded of primality and urges beyond his beloved clean, slicing logic. He glares at the sky, full of hate, and kicks an unfortunate clump of grass.

The village of Tintagel is not far from the Hall. It is not long before the stone-paved paths turn to dirt beneath his feet. The lone pub is at the far end of the main street with a faded wooden sign proclaiming _The White Dragon_ and St Piran’s Flag waving. This is old mythology, the Anglo Saxons against the Welsh. (Severus has never felt Celtic in the way the Cornish people do. He is an Englishman, from Yorkshire. White roses run in his father’s blood, which is both Anglo Saxon and Norman. He knows his ancestors; he has seen their careful script in the baptismal and funeral books. He can trace his nose back to an illegitimate toss off of Richard III’s.)

He takes a seat at the far end of the bar and orders a pint of amber lager. There is a slight murmur at his arrival. Several faces lean in the damp light, committing his broken, crooked nose to memory.

“You’re the new tutor at the Hall, aren’t you?” Someone says, “Ida and Bobby mentioned you were coming this week.” He nods, biting back the reply rising to his mouth. _I have that unfortunate distinction, yes._ (Severus can be pleasant when he wants something. He thirsts for any information on his new employer.) The lager comes, icy and frothing. He focuses on that instead.

“Severus Snape,” he says. The others nod.

“Better you up there than me,” the fellow at the end of the bar gives an exaggerated shudder. Severus’ brow quirks.

The bartender laughs, "There are a lot of stories about John Hawthorne, Mr. Snape. Especially from these guys. We don't talk lightly about him around here." He polishes a glass and then leans in, "You're not from around here. But the thing is that Cornwall, it's old. Old in a way other places aren't. Things happen here that don't happen in other places. Maybe it's the fae, I don't know. I mean, this is where King Arthur was born, you know?" He pauses and leans on the counter, wiping his hands on his side towel. "Hawthorne's not from here either. No one actually knows where he's from. I mean, Hawthorne's certainly not his real name, I think. They say he's from Belgium or Luxembourg - but no one knows for sure. His accent's certainly English enough - but what I do know is that no one likes to go to the Hall, especially after night. I've seen strange things myself in those trees and those moors. Sometimes people go there and just don't come back again."

He does not need to be reminded that these lands are strange and wild, he can feel the old Celtic earth roiling against him. He is sour; his family have been Englishmen for centuries. But here still with his Roman name and Roman nose, he feels like an interloper. His imperial name is a bitter irony; he will never achieve such greatness. (He tries not to think of Potter, who is from the West Country. Potter who is from Godric’s Hollow, nestled not fifteen miles from Tintagel. He could sense the unorthodox Brythonic rhythms to Potter’s pale skin, dark hair, pine needle eyes. Maybe that is where the conflict started. Maybe it was before Harry, before James, in some ancient ancestral battle between Roman and Breton.)

“Strange things?” Severus asks, he sips his lager. A bit splashes back at his mouth as he lifts the bottle too quickly. He wipes at it with his sleeve.

“Yeah. Unnatural. And sounds.” The bartender pauses, rubbing his hands along the polished counter. “You can hear ghosts up by the Hall. Most of the town rather reckon it’s a bit haunted. I know some think he’s keeping a mad wife or something up there.”

He takes the same paths back to the Hall with unsteady steps. (Severus has never held his alcohol well.) His cheeks are ruddy and mottled with blush. His breath forms cumulus clouds in the cold late-autumn air. He climbs the back stairs with exaggerated caution, careful to not wake a soul, even the mad ghosts he has heard so much of. In his room, he washes his face in the basin of cool water and the clear liquid runs from his forehead to the tip of his nose and drips onto his nightshirt. He stares at his face in the small mirror, the sum of both his parents. He prods at the crows’ feet around his deep-set eyes, his nose, the severe chin. He is no beauty. (He tells himself it does not matter, he would not want to be.) His mouth falls naturally into his mother’s displeased scowl, his eyes into his father’s judgmental glare. _Get the bloody hell away from me_. He could not escape them. He turns away, from them and from himself.

He has never been keen on sleep. (It is worse now than ever.) He stays upright until the last possible moment, when sleepache creeps in with long fingers and he is vulnerable and caves. In bed, his mind wanders. He’d rather it not, he knows where it will lead.

 _Harry bloody Potter._ His bed was an impossibly cold expanse. The loneliness of the single-person serving. His gaze would linger on a mess of black hair. The curls are not Potter’s but they are like his and in the end equally as far away. He had tried to focus but his hands shook and he dropped things. _I need you to moderate me._ There is a bitter satisfaction in the case of Potter’s death. In death, Severus cannot mar him. In death, Potter is preserved.

He does not delude himself with thoughts that he is a good man. He knows from the tip of the skin cells, the keratinocytes, of his fingers to the marrow in his bones that he is a monster sent to destroy everything he touches. No, he is like black India ink which stains all things. He is the soot from the cinnamon peelers that mark all surfaces. One cannot brush against Severus Snape and come back clean. No, he knows this. He is not proud of it. He had thought that he might be impartial. The matter of his cruelty and his monstrosity is a simple fact, of course, something to be observed and to mark down as a central truth of the Universe. Severus has called himself an atheist from a very young age but quietly he knows that the marks are against him and that God will not call him at the end of the long day. He will, like all dark and unwanted things, be left to rot. (He was once asked during the Wizengamot trials if he was aware of how many he had murdered. He had claimed to have no idea. This was the deepest lie; Severus knows every bloodied mark carved into his wand. Each one has ripped another piece from his psyche, each one has struck and chipped away at the light. He knows their broken bodies. He knows them all.)

No, he wants to focus on something clean. He thinks of when his hate for the boy began. He remembers everything about how Potter had chafed against his soul. The snarl in his heart had caught at the very moment those too-big green eyes turned round with wonderment at the magic woven through Hogwarts, adrift in a sea of possibilities. No, he could not stand it, not while Severus knows only the limitations of magic these days. That which cannot be done. Death cannot be unwoven, love cannot be forced, lies cannot be made truths. Disillusioned, he finds the edges of magic. He reaches into the deep, fathoms below _Accio’s_ reach. He considers the atmosphere. Casts back through his own history, through human history to the Egyptians and the Assyrians and beyond where history darkens and magic, as in all things, cannot quite reach. (He does not think about his own arrival at Hogwarts twenty-one years prior as a skinny little sallow-colored boy with similarly wide eyes.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
**Part II:  
Some Stories Are Best Told In The Dark**

_I have only two emotions /_  
_careful fear and dead devotion /_  
_I can’t get the balance right /_  
_throw my marbles in the fight._  
\- The National, Don’t Swallow The Cap

_January 2009_  
_Cornwall_

The villagers of Tintagel may have had their suspicions about the Hall’s recent owner but the household staff and Jack told a different story. Ida spoke only of her employer in the warmest terms. She'd been the first to join the house when Mr. Hawthorne had bought it ten years ago. It had been an old great estate in ruin and the man had poured quite a bit of time and money into repairs. Severus is increasingly curious why he had stopped short, why was the left wing in such a state of disrepair? Why did Hawthorne keep on such a small skeleton staff when the house could, and would certainly, benefit from a far greater team?

Ida meets him in the hallway one Tuesday morning, "The master arrived late last night. He would like for you to join him in the dining room." Severus nods. He adjusts his dark jacket before stepping in.

The family dining room wasn't overly large and it was paneled in rich red brocade wallpaper. Severus morbidly muses that where the morning light hit it, the color looked rather like dried blood. At the head of the table, plain of face with sandy brown hair and equally sandy eyes, sits a man of perhaps thirty. His breakfast is long forgotten in favor of the newspaper on his lap. His tweed coat is sharp although a bit old-fashioned and Severus has the immediate unsettling impression that they had met before. "Ah, you must be Mr. Snape," says the man, "I'm sorry I wasn't here to welcome you." He smiles briefly, "John Hawthorne, pleased to make your acquaintance."

"Likewise, Mr. Hawthorne."

The other man laughs, "No, please call me John. I can't stand too much formality." He stands to shake his hand, clasping Severus' fingers in his shorter, rougher ones. For a fraction of a second, there is an odd shimmer to the air and twist to Severus' gut that immediately tilts the world on its axis. He is suddenly, horribly sure that his employer is wearing a glamour and an impressive one at that. His long-honed preservation instincts can feel the magic hovering as surely as he knows that a lesser wizard would never notice. He wonders why a man who could change his appearance so completely would choose to look so forgettable.

"Jack isn't bothering you too much, I hope," says Hawthorne. It is that it was an empty statement, not a question. The other man clearly expects him to be irritated and say something unkind and intends to forestall any argument. It is unsettling to be treated with so much familiarity. Almost as if Hawthorne knew exactly what to expect from Severus. There is a note of pride in the younger man's voice, not unlike a pleased parent. He noted that the other man spoke with little accent and in almost pitch-perfect Received Pronunciation. He could be from anywhere in Britain as it was common and forgettable enough. He hadn't realized how much he had hoped for some clue into his employer's background, any breadcrumb, like a Welsh accent or a hint of Liverpool.

“Jack has applied himself well to his studies,” Severus said. He had a strange urge to disprove the younger man’s expectations. A broad grin takes over Hawthorne’s face. It is genuine and guileless. Severus feels the urge to return the ridiculous grin and squashes it.

“Yeah, well,” he says, running his fingers (they are broad and short with square nailbeds) through his brown hair. In the light, his hair burnishes gold and copper. These are odd moments of beauty breaking out of such a plain face, like light piercing through stained glass. Severus is fascinated. “He’s a great kid.”

“Indeed, Mr. Hawthorne,” he says. Hawthorne looks at him with an odd expression, like he cannot quite make his new tutor out. “How do you like the Hall?”

“It’s a fine house,” he says. It is. It reeks with beauty and oddness. The house has a way of making someone feel quite small and insubstantial in context. He loves that about it - he has always loved things that dwarfed him. He cannot harm space, he cannot harm the vast oceans, he cannot harm Reichenbach Hall.

Severus withdrew. Ida met him in the hallway.

“He’s certainly in a pleased mood this morning,” she says. “I wonder what’s gotten into him.”

“Oh?”

"It is interesting though. As I said, there were a great many applicants but John singled you out. He’s never done that before,” Ida said, "Wouldn't hear no for an answer." Severus raised his eyebrows. He had certainly assumed that Ida had selected his application, especially once he was quite sure his mysterious employer was, in fact, a wizard. He was aware of his many considered flaws that were public to the wizarding world and that had driven him to seek employment in the Muggle realm. He had been prepared for a long period of unemployment should his inquiry go unanswered. Who would select him out of their right mind?

“I’m very curious what you’ll make of each other,” Ida says, “John doesn’t take to many people. Oh, he likes them well enough. But he’s a bit hard to get to know.” She fluffs a blanket, her hands deftly smoothing out the wool. “But once you know him, he’s got the greatest heart. Don’t listen to what everyone says in town. He hates those rumors.” She smiles, eyes a bit faraway, “And I don’t really right know why he bought this house. He’s not much for standing on ceremony. Give him a cup of tea and a piece of pie and he’s right happy.”

“Pie?” Severus asks, his mouth quirks.

“Oh yes,” Ida grins. “Any pies, all pies. But I’ll tell you a secret that cherry pie is his favorite.”

There is a pause. June enters the room. She signals to Ida, who drops her folding. Ida’s mouth grows firm and grim. Severus’ irritation grows and he suddenly recalls that he’d meant to mention to Ida about the dead bird. He’d imagined it was a cat at first but is increasingly certain that the grotesque offering was June’s doing.

“I’ll find you later, Severus.”

Later, he tells himself that his conclusions must be wrong. The stories of the Hall had gotten to him. he was tired. Glamours had fallen out of favor decades prior, mainly due to how difficult they were to maintain. They required constant casting by the wearer, which meant that in moments of sleep or unconsciousness, they would disappear. There were also a great many limitations on how much you could change with a glamour. They were cosmetic only, one’s gender and age could not be concealed. They could not be made to imitate another existing face, only to change one’s own. Due to the limits, most glamours were cast as parlor tricks. No, _if_ it was a glamour, then John Hawthorne is running away from something very large. Severus has never heard of someone maintaining a glamour for over ten years.

* * *

“Oh, shit,” he hears. The papers scatter through the room and into the hallway like snowflakes on a gust of wind. (Severus decides he quite likes the casual profanity in the other man’s mouth.) He is gathering them quickly, page after page on lesson plans for the water cycle and sedimentary rocks, hoping to find -

“Oh, wow,” The other man’s voice is reverent, his tanned hands spread out on the heavy bristol papers. Severus does not have to look to see what is in front of Hawthorne, he created those sketches. _Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings_ , he thinks. They are revealing in a way that most other truths about him are not. He has sketched the fruit bowl, the elm on the west lawn, and Hawthorne asleep in front of the fire. (He had been drawn to the way the light had danced across the planes of the younger man’s face.) “Did you draw these?”

Severus studies the other man’s face. Marks the lines around the mouth and dark shadows beneath his eyes. Hawthorne looks poleaxed, “I had no idea you could draw.”

“Idle sketches,” he says. He grits his molars and wishes he were anywhere but here. But Hawthorne is looking at the sketch of himself and seems entranced. His eyes shift to Severus and Severus feels pinned. It is almost as if a new thought were dawning for the other man, like he is coming to some previously unconsidered conclusion. Hawthorne holds up the drawing, “Can I keep this?”

His stomach is in knots, he swallows several times. He musters some distance and a patrician indifference, “Do as you like,” he says stiffly. (He is used to provoking men with his tone, his words. Hawthorne is strange, he takes it in stride.)

Hawthorne continues staring at the sketch of himself for some time, Severus hovering awkwardly nearby desperate to collect his papers and leave the queer tableaux. Hawthorne cleared his throat and hands the papers back, “Come, we’re going on an expedition today.”

Severus pauses in his surprise, “An expedition?”

“Yeah, I want to show you the grounds.” Hawthorne grins, it transforms his face. “You can’t live at the Hall without knowing the grounds. They’re why I bought the place.”

It isn’t a long walk but by the end of it, Severus is struggling to catch his breath. He tucks the old black scarf, still stiff with blood (he has not washed it), around his neck. Hawthorne, his face always broadly agreeable, is widely grinning in the sunlight. He had known then, that Tintagel was situated upon cliffs over the sea. He had not ever seen the sea like this. His heart beats rapidly and he swallows. Here, against the swell of sky and sea, he can almost forgive anything. The sharp wind pricks at his dark eyes, ruddies his cheeks in the cold. He has a wild impulse to leap from the edge of the earth. He closes his eyes and inhales, his face turned toward the sun. He turns toward Hawthorne, who is watching him. Hawthorne who has a somewhat shocked expression on his face. The other man has a faint smile playing on his mouth.

“I thought you’d like them,” Hawthorne mutters quietly. _Yes_ , Severus thinks, _I do. I do like them._ Instead, he musters a bit of propriety and stills his face.

“I do,” he says. _It is more than that,_ he thinks, _They are perfect, they are transcendent._

“My parents are from here,” Hawthorne says, looking at the water. “I didn’t grow up here though. But sometimes, I think I can almost remember it.”

He nods, “Where did you grow up?”

Hawthorne shrugs, “Nowhere special.” He pauses and looks again at the old professor, “I’m glad you came.” The easy smile again, that borrowed and false face relaxing. The wind ruffles his hair, “Ida’s only had good things to say.”

“She’s a remarkable woman,” Severus agrees quietly, “She had the same for you.”

“She thinks more of me than I deserve.” It does not reach his eyes.

 

* * *

 

The identity of his odd new employer has become a bit of a fascination. He files away any pieces of information that Hawthorne accidentally lets slip. There hasn’t been much, if he’s honest. The other man is incredibly careful. Severus has learned precious few pieces of information. Alone, no family, approximately thirty years old. Athletic, has probably played some kind of a sport in the past. Parents from Cornwall or nearby, so certainly British.

He steeled himself for his apparition to the library in Diagon Alley. Forever unwelcome, but still, belonging despite his better efforts. It somehow seemed harder to come here from the Hall than it had from Spinner’s End. The Hall had, somehow in the last few weeks, come to feel more like home than Spinner’s End ever had.

The Records Hall was at the other end of the street from Gringotts. It was a repository of information of every British witch and wizard of recorded time (Although, due to administration, it really was only reliable back to the Ministry Government’s current incarnation begun in 1626.). There was little question that the name John Hawthorne wouldn’t be registered, yet he checked all the same.

There he peers through record after record. There was simply no wizard between twenty-five and thirty-five born in Britain who would fit Hawthorne's description. Most were young men that he had taught. Many were dead. He briefly considers widening his search to younger and older ages but decided against it. It seemed, as far as he could reason, that it was incredibly unlikely that Hawthorne was more than thirty years old. And younger than twenty-five? No, the man held himself with some measure of grace acquired by age. It was out of the realm of reason. Perhaps he had been born on the Continent. America? His records didn't cover that berth. The truly curious part was that, clearly, the man had had no dealings with a single British witch or wizard despite having lived in Cornwall for the past ten years. How was that possible?

 

* * *

 

Severus busies himself in studying the text in hand. He tries to cultivate an air of preoccupation that, while certainly felt, was not at all due to words of T.H. White. His skin prickles pleasantly, although he would be loath to admit it to another living creature.

"Classic literature?" Hawthorne's smile is easy as always. Severus knows the remark was good-natured but bristles all the same. Hawthorne’s smile falters, "Hey, sorry. Didn't mean anything." Severus had let his pile accumulate on the small table next to his chair. He’d found some excellent condition trade paperbacks of _The Great Gatsby_ and _The Count of Monte Cristo_. The mass market of _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ had unfortunately seen better days but the binding still held up. He idly wonders what Hawthorne would think of the frayed representation of the American Dream in _Gatsby_. Would he prefer something quicker and wittier like Twain, or fast and heavily plotted like _Monte Cristo_?

"Your library is well-appointed." Severus finally offers. Hawthorne laughs, “It’s a small pleasure of mine. One of the few things I get to have these days.” There is a sly look to the brown eyes, “No doubt I have some former teachers who would be shocked to see it. I haven’t had much to do these past ten years but read.” He wonders not for the first time what Hawthorne would have been like as a student. He was simultaneously so open and guarded that it was impossible to tell. Hawthorne gestures to the book in Severus’ hand, an old hardcover copy of _The Once and Future King_ , “That’s one of my favorites actually.”

“It seemed appropriate for the setting.” His thumb rifles across the yellowed pages reverently. Hawthorne nods, moving to look out the large window down to the grounds. “It is, isn’t it? We’re in Arthur’s lands here.” Hawthorne gently moves the velvet curtain out of the way, “I’ve always been interested in the legend. The once and future king. Resurrection.” He turns and looks appraisingly at his tutor, “Do you think it’s a legend, Mr. Snape?”

This was dangerous ground. Severus turns the question over in his mind. Visions of madmen bubble to the surface hoping for air, “I hope, for all our sakes, that the dead stay dead, Mr. Hawthorne. I have had enough of men seeking immortality.” Hawthorne turns and studies him with a long searching look. Severus thinks of the magical signature he had felt in the other man. There was simply no possible way Hawthorne could live as a wizard alive in Britain and not realize exactly to what he was referencing. He thrills for a moment, his heart beating a tattoo. Would Hawthorne pick up the gauntlet that had been thrown down? _I know what you are. I don’t know who you are, not yet. But I know what you are._

“Most men choose to live on through their children,” Hawthorne says, the glint of a smile hovers in his eyes.

“And you? No doubt you’ll have your pick of women to run this place,” The younger man twists his face in an odd smile. Severus is suddenly, dangerously sure that the other man had no interest in that statement. His throat dry, skin prickling at hair follicles, he needs to change the subject. _Of all the miserable luck._

“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” his employer murmurs quietly, as if to himself. He pauses and suddenly straightens his back, “I have business to attend to. Good day, Mr. Snape. Please make yourself at home.” Severus’ eyes linger for a long time on the retreating figure. He felt the familiar thrill of recognition of like to like. He could identify the ridges in Hawthorne’s speech, the familiar missing pieces, the same dance. From one queer old man to another, he sensed Hawthorne. _You are like me and I am like you._

(He can read the tells in sensing another ‘avowed bachelor’ but has little experience. He had tried once. It was 1976 and he remembers that Michael McGinty, Ravenclaw, had been playing Lou Reed’s _Transformer_ on the old record player in the empty shared dorm. They had been rushed with the knowledge that other students could return at any time and Severus had sucked McGinty into his mouth -tasting of the ocean, tasting of dust - and had come far too soon rutting against the edge of the bed. He had been sixteen. He hadn’t tried again. The year after he would sign his life away and there would be little hope of comfort then.)

 

* * *

 

It was late. Dinner had been served and cleaned up. Severus had grown accustomed to sharing meals with Hawthorne, Jack, and Ida but the master of the house had been away for the evening on business and it had been a quiet affair. Severus was rather loathe to admit he even enjoyed the other man’s company and told himself that the relative silence had been pleasant. After, he had withdrawn to the drawing room with a book and a healthy tumbler of scotch. After scarce half an hour had passed, Hawthorne came into the drawing room. Severus started at his arrival. “No, don’t!” The other man said, “don’t get up on account of me.” He crossed to the bar and started pouring himself a drink from the decanter. “What are you drinking?”

“The Laprohaig.” Severus took in the other man’s disheveled appearance. Hawthorne’s sandy hair stood up unruly on all ends, as if he had run his fingers through it repeatedly. There was an odd sense of familiarity to that gesture; surely he’d noticed it somewhere before. His jacket had been lost somewhere in the depths of the Hall before coming into the room and his tie hung loose around his neck. The sleeves of his white shirt were pushed up over his elbows, showing strong and tanned vascular arms. The veins lay blue and green just under the skin and for the briefest moment Severus thought of tracing them back to the heart. Severus’ mouth ran dry. He’d never seen the younger man in any state of disarray, much less like this - warmed by alcohol, loose, expansive, so open. _What kind of mask have you been wearing?_

“Good choice.” Hawthorne sipped from the glass. His eyes closed for a long beat and then stared into the fire. His fingers tightened slightly around the scotch, fingernails paling at the pressure. _Where were you?_ He thinks. "Do you miss it, Snape?" Hawthorne paused, his finger circling the rim of his glass. "The real world, I mean. _Our_ world?" Severus froze. It was one thing to know Hawthorne was a wizard, but it was another thing entirely to hear the man admit it. Severus' fingers shook slightly. He thought briefly of denying it but immediately cast the idea aside. If he could feel that amount of magic rumbling beneath the other wizard’s skin, there was no chance that he had gone undetected. No, and with the name he had unfortunately chosen to use, Severus Snape, he was not unknown to wizarding kind.

He raised an eyebrow. “ _Our_ world, sir?” He asks archly. The other man blushes. It is distressingly interesting.

“I know who you are, of course,” Hawthorne says, his eyes turned down. “You’re in the _Prophet_.”

"No, I’m glad to be rid of it," he lied. Did he miss it? The only home he had ever known - the sweet bubbling of a cauldron, the magic singing like sirens through his veins? The other man gave him a long, calculating look before laughing suddenly. It sounded a bit sad to Severus’ ears. "I wish I had your strength." The questions sat, unbidden and unwelcome, on his tongue. _Why are you an outcast? Who are you? What did you do?_

"You know my name, you know what I’ve done. My crimes were all published in _excruciating_ detail in that miserable rag they call a newspaper. That world hardly welcomes one such as myself." He murmured, sipping the scotch.

"You're a war hero."

Severus’ black eyebrows shot up. _Hero_ was not a term commonly applied to him. No, instead - "You must have been reading some other infernal paper. I am a villain, Mr. Hawthorne, as I am reminded daily. Nothing else," He said curtly. His hands grip the unfortunate whiskey glass tightly, white appearing on his black-haired knuckles.

“ _John_.” Hawthorne reiterated distractedly, "But you fought with the Order! You protected Hogwarts - surely someone can argue on your behalf." Severus _hmphs_. He thinks of his many reluctant invitations to victory celebrations, the hosts always careful to stage him near the back where he is not seen. Careful to shake his hand at the end, once the audience has lost interest and has dissipated to buffets and open bars.

"Only Albus knew. Albus and our sacrificial lamb of a fool boy hero knew," he says. The words are harsher than he expects, they cut at him as they leave his tongue. He would not be surprised to find his mouth soaked in blood.

"But you fought-"

"It does not matter what I did. There is no one left to speak for me. Albus is dead. Potter is dead." Hawthorne looks at him through long, dark eyelashes. There was an odd pause. "Do you believe that, Mr. Snape?" He feels the air go out of him. _Broken bones, broken body, broken stones. Why is it that the one time I held you, you did not breathe._ He thought of how he has learned that colors can slice through, clean to the bone. Red, like his blood, red like that infernal Weasley sweater. Green like lake-bottom eyes sick with kelp. Potter was never grey, never black, never white. Potter had been colors, bright and deep, a riot of color that had torn through his life and left smears like paint. Severus stuck safely to greys and blacks. He learned to cut the remnants of Potter from his life. Away from the red, away from the green. Away from Scotland and magic and shy, toothy grins that he had only ever seen as a third party.

_Imagine a despicable life._

"If he is not, he's applied himself more thoroughly to his concealment than to any of his studies previously." The liquid in Hawthorne's glass burnished in the firelight. Hawthorne snorted, "You may very well be right." Severus’ eyes were drawn to his employer. No, he had to admit that his first horrible inclination was correct; Hawthorne certainly wore a glamour. What a curiosity, that the facade the man chose to wear was so perfectly forgettable. Fair-skinned. Sandy brown hair and eyes. Indeterminate age, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. There was some measure of familiarity to him that Severus could not place, like the memory of a dream slipping through his fingers. It felt odd but despite the wholly unimpressive visage, he felt increasingly drawn to the younger man. It was his words, the way his voice trailed off in thought, eyes that stormed with emotion, all added up to be greater than the sum of his parts. His eyes lingered for a moment too long, he felt the other man's presence around corners and through walls - just there and simmering underneath, a trace of magic. _What have I forgotten?_

“He must have been awful to teach,” Hawthorne said in a low voice. “I’ve heard some stories.”

Severus snorted. _That’s the understatement of the century, John Hawthorne._ “He was a godforsaken infernal nightmare. Impertinent, dangerous, absolutely considered the rules beneath him. Obstinate -” he paused, “Brilliant, though.” Hawthorne looked up, surprised. Severus smirked, “Is it really a surprise that the boy who finally killed the Dark Lord was naturally gifted? Of course, he didn’t ever seem to _apply_ himself to honing that skill. He’d rather have spent it on Quidditch and his useless friends. But he had it in spades.” There were many things he had also had. Foolish courage, an endearing toothy grin (eyes like absinthe). Oh, he had had those in great supply. These were things Severus would take to the grave.

“You really hated him, didn’t you?” Hawthorne shifted uncomfortably, rolling his shoulders toward the fire. His face looked unhappy.

Severus closed his eyes. He really should not have accepted the second glass. Suddenly he felt so impossibly tired. A long pause stretched on between them. Then, when they had both nearly forgotten the topic, “No, Mr. Hawthorne. I did not.”

“But you - you were _awful_ to him. Rows, trying to get him expelled -”

“He brought it on himself,” Severus glared. “He infuriated me. He was impossible to teach. He was impossible to keep alive. He would have been _safer_ expelled and back with his worthless Muggle relatives. The blasted boy was never where he should have been and Albus just led him directly to the slaughter.” He sighed, “It didn’t matter. He was offered up like a goddamn blood sacrifice.”

Hawthorne blinked and was quiet for a long time, “I thought you wouldn’t have cared; I thought you hated him.”

Severus closed his eyes, “Whatever I wanted for Potter, it was never that.” (Severus does not know what he wants. Every choice in his life has been the lesser of two evils, avoiding that which he _did not want_.) Hawthorne is silent then, his eyes are eerie in the firelight and snakelike. Severus has the distinct impression that someone else is behind them, sharing them, watching his every move. _No one stays there after dark_. He hears all the rumors repeated, never the same one twice.

That night he lays himself down in his grey-walled room and listens to the winds batter at the bricks. The air whips through the eaves and howls. He crosses his arms like a Pharaoh in his sarcophagus. Severus thinks of the dead, mummified men wrapped up like gifts and locked away within their boxes. Their riches had long since been plundered, the Victorians had stolen the bones like talismans, as the medievals had done to their saints, and brought them back into Britain to be pulverized into dust. He wonders what it would feel like to place a coin on his tongue for Chiron’s payment across the river Styx. Deliberately he tries to slow his breath, his pulse, to stillness. Time passes, he is not sure if it is minutes or hours.

He shivers and rolls over, brushing the death from his body.

 

* * *

 

He can list most of what he has forgotten.

_Neglect. I have forgotten how you smell. I have never known your taste. I can see pale green things (eyes, your eyes) in my memory but the specifics are missing. I have caricatures. Generalizations. The water is cold, murky. The color of your hair, dark as spiders' legs. Lakemoss. Pale like alewives. I attached to you. Zebra mussel to the hull of a ship. Ballast. Poisoned. Infected. Let me start. I want to rebuild you, atom by atom. I will thread atoms to molecules, molecules to cells. Lay the structure of your bonework, your nervous system, capillaries, your sinew, and musculature. Flesh, teeth, bile. I want to know you like a recipe. One part hair, three parts strong thighs. Sea anemone, smelling of salt air. Let me write you a poem. I want to make love to you the way a virus does. Crawl into you, singular, unnoticed, unobstructed. I will enter your pores, your cells, lick your DNA and imprint myself upon. Replicate until I am filling you and full of you. One body, indivisible by God._

When he casts back he's not sure when it started. Earlier, perhaps, than he'd like to admit. It was easy to hate the boy at first, eleven years old and coasting on celebrity while wearing the face of a long-dead antagonist. But Harry Potter had had a lonely countenance and winced at raised voices. His clothes were too big and his frame was too small and where else had Severus seen that before but in the self of a younger man with black hair and black eyes and a similar nervous twitch? Another man who also had counted the spiders in dark rooms and had been forgotten. No, Harry Potter had been nothing like his father. _You shouldn't've been so beautiful._ At first, he had considered the boy. Then momentary thoughts had crept in. _Those eyes are looking very green today. Do you blush all over?_ By the time of Potter's sixth year, he was ruined. _What do you smell like after Quidditch practice? What makes you blush? What makes your toes curl? What do you think about at night?_ (Severus does not know how to operate without hate. If he could not hate Harry Potter directly, he could hate Harry Potter for making him like the brat. Later, long after he’d given up, he would hate himself for giving in.)

No, he is not sure when it started but he knows when he first learned he did not hate Harry Potter. Albus had invited him for tea, given him a blueberry scone (he sipped the tea, the scone, as always, sat untouched) and told him to watch out for the boy, who had been making clandestine midnight trips to the Mirror of Erised. As Severus had stood up from the over-plush velvet chair and turned to leave, he had paused. “What does he see?” He had asked (he shouldn’t have asked).

Albus had given him a long searching look, those eyes (like peacocks, like lapis lazuli) locking onto his own. “His family,” Albus had finally said and Severus’ hate had broken like a dam. _God, look at yourself, Severus._ He had harbored no illusions, no designs. _Twice his age, his teacher, a villain, I would stain him._ No, Severus knows that he may be the villain in this story but that he is not a monster. Not, at least, that kind of monster. Not this time. (Not, truly, that any distinction had mattered. Potter had detested him. Severus’ baser instincts would remain safely hidden.)

He likes to pause on the stairs where a large painting of the Crucifixion hangs. How is it possible to cease existing? What animates us? He pictures his mother (God save her soul), queen of the mermaids, her hair like seaweed in the tides. How does a body fall apart in the water? Is it the flesh first - bloated and pale? The lips purple, the skin begins to peel away from bone, calcification. The mouth then opens into that great scream of nothingness. On the ocean floor there, in the sand, come the vampire squids and carpet sharks to eat the cheeks, sweetest of all, and nudge the joints. Disarticulation. Out of place and out of time. After death, are you still aware, do you still watch as your eyes are swallowed by eels? Do you see the inside of the belly of the beast? (He has caused death, seen death, and craved death - yet he still does not understand death. The cold finality seems perplexing. He looks for the dead around corners, expecting their voices.)

 _Avada kedavra_ is the third Unforgivable curse. It is green and it is unquestionably dark and your whole arm crackles with the energy needed to kill another living being, funneled from bone to bone, from skin to skin, from where your heartbeat starts and there - down the marrow, down the artery, down the wand to the heart of the other and where it suddenly stops. He's felt this energy before, this boneache, this heart-rot, but he'd never felt it with the same ferocity. Never before Potter’s death has he felt like there should be more after _avada kedavra_. That flames should start at each floorboard and joist and burn up all the carbon and oxygen in the air until there was nothing left.

Yes, _avada kedavra_ is green, he thought, while _crucio_ is red. Red like the sweater the boy used to wear. He had smelled the wool and it had smelled of sweat and the boy's cedarwood trunk. But then, Severus remembers, the child didn't smell like that then, did he? He remembered the broken body on the floor and can still smell the iron-rich blood staining the wood and he knew, although he had never shot a gun, that Harry Potter smelled exactly like one fired. Yes. Red.

 _Imperio_ is blue, he thought. And so he had, in some measure of heartwrench, cast _imperio,_ ; and had forced the dark-robed men to dance like puppets, to cast death upon one another, fathers and sons. Blue, he remembered, like the color of your veins beneath your skin. He remembers the skin of the boy's wrist barely emerging from the godforsaken Weasley wool sweaters and heavy school robes, pale and threaded with blue like a topographic map.

It wasn't supposed to end like this. In the tales, the hero always triumphs. _Potter, you died, you did not come back. The hero always comes back. Don't you know how the stories go?_ The priests say Potter was with God now. He is fairly sure they are lying. They had said the same thing of his mother. His mother who had never gone to church. His mother who had climbed on top of the roof and yelled Satan’s part in _Paradise Lost_ to the sky. _What though the field be lost?_ No, he knows that these are lies for the living. He does not believe.

(Much of the earth is a mystery to us. Seventy-one percent of the earth is water, eighty percent of that water is unmapped, uncharted, unexplored. He is alone here in his confusion and loneliness. He does not know which direction to turn. There are no countries here, cities, cultures, boundaries. He marks his progress instead by shipwrecks and coral reefs.)

 

* * *

 

The sun has long disappeared below the ground. Severus stands at the door to his room. John Hawthorne had followed him, ostensibly on the pretext of going to his own room despite Severus’ quarters being flung far out of his way. His hand rests on the doorknob but he feels an odd sense of reluctance to break the moment.

"Is the room to your liking?" He could hear the thickness in the other's voice, rich like velvet. Hawthorne's deer-colored eyes stare intently at him, bright with something Severus didn't dare to name. Suddenly his skin is far too tight for his body and his scalp prickles. "Well, it is not an Azkaban cell, thus I suppose it’s more than adequate,” he says dryly.

Hawthorne barks a short laugh, "You know, you’re a lot funnier than I expected you to be." Severus’ mouth quirks.

"Being relieved of my duties as an evil spy has left me some ample time to study other...forms of communication." He murmurs. Since when had they stood so close together? His nostrils twitch. He can smell Hawthorne from this distance. He is rich with the scent of wool and vetiver soap. A bit of aftershave. The world has narrowed to these mere inches between them. He considers the molecules, one after another, that leads from himself to this man. Skin to oxygen to hydrogen to skin. "Jack has really taken to you, you know," Hawthorne's eyes drag up Severus’ body, from the line of his hip to his chest to his mouth. (Severus has never been looked at like this before, he is suddenly insecure. He knows he is lacking.) Severus licks his lips and Hawthorne repeats the action. He stares at the wetness that glimmers in the low incandescence.

"He must be a poor judge of character," Severus murmurs. He watches Hawthorne grin. When had the start of a beard begun on that pale face? The shadow hints over the bottom half of his face and Severus feels another low pulse of arousal shoot through him. The younger man was a study in contrasts, plain and yet equally unforgettable. "I somehow doubt it," Hawthorne says, his voice low. His eyes do not leave Severus’ lips. He finds his mouth watering. He wants so much. (He is not allowed.) Tawny eyes find his own dark ones, "Good night, Mr. Snape." There is something about that voice. He cannot place it. Hawthorne turns and slings his jacket over his shoulder, disappearing down the hall.

"Good night, John Hawthorne," Severus whispers to no one in particular. It is his first time saying the name John and he tastes it in his mouth. He rolls it on his tongue and pairs it safely with a last name.

It is the knowing that does him in. He knows, although Severus Snape has never been a great judge of character, that they are hurtling toward something. Sometimes he is not sure if he desperately needs it to happen or desperately wants to avoid it. He cannot gulp enough air, his skin is both hot and cold simultaneously, and there in the pit of his stomach is a gnawing both like and unlike hunger. Food will not sate him, nothing will, unless that looming precipice. For he knows, as surely as he knows anything in this world, that they will go off that cliff together.

It is only a matter of time.

He busies himself. He fills his hands and moves things back and forth. He puts them in order again and again. For this desire (he can call it that now, for that is what it is) is disorder and perhaps by controlling his things, his surroundings, he might control himself. Sometimes he thinks that he's managed it and then Hawthorne gives him a long searching look from hooded tawny eyes and Severus feels the heat rise in his skin faster than he can catch his breath. He knows Hawthorne is being deliberate, that he is enjoying the dance around the inevitable, and Severus loathes him for it. He is the prey encircled and he hates feeling that way.

But then John Hawthorne is gentle and bright and loves Oscar Wilde and _Paradise Lost_. He has bags under his eyes in the morning, evidence of rough sleep and not nearly enough of it. He is easy-to-smile yet sharp-tongued. Severus expects only harshness with lust, a pleasure razor-edged in pain, but he has a difficult time reconciling what he knows of the moody, capricious man with his own experiences. It is a strange lust (he does not think the word love, he cannot, that is locked away). He has wanted before but never has it felt reciprocated. Hawthorne seems equally unanchored, often caught looking too long or standing too close to Severus and then when realized, he would turn away rapidly with ruddied cheekbones. If John Hawthorne had been confident or cocksure about these strange thoughts, Severus could have retreated to the comfort of hate. But no, the damnable man had to also seem equally as lost and as breathless. He is a surprise and Severus has fallen. He hates it.

_There was something he was supposed to remember._

Inside his room, the heavy velvet curtains were drawn and no candles were lit. There was a beat of several seconds before the candlelight could race to the corners and scare the shadows off. His eyes took several moments to acclimate to the low light. First came the image of the shapes of furniture: the desk, the bed, the wardrobe. It starts at his peripheral vision and creeps into the center. Then there is a moment when he realizes that the quiet is all wrong and there is no silence but a soft hiss of movement against the cotton bedsheets. He holds his light higher and sees instead a coiled shape on the bed with two very large yellow eyes staring directly at him.

_Hissssssss._

The snake lunges for him, its sinewy body arching cleanly through the air. He is faster, he has had years with another serpent, and his wand is at the ready and the Killing Curse on his lips. The snake’s eyes void and it falls at his feet harmless. He stares at the duochrome scales, which shift in the flickering light from amber to coral and back again along the wavelength of fire. _June._ He knows at once that June (cackling, mad) must have put this here. His righteous indignation flares. _That goddamn miserable wretch of a woman could’ve killed someone._ He plucks the dead snake from the floor and drops it on the dresser. He will speak to Ida about this. (His fingers find the knotted scar on his neck. God, he hates snakes now.)

Sleep has never come easily to him. When it does come, late at night and on the first probes of dawn, he dreams of a feast of thighs and long, arching spines. Fevered kisses. Brown, sometimes green, eyes staring into his own, wild as dogs, as bony and roughshod fingers clamp into his bicep. The body shifts beneath him at once both strong and muscular and lithe and compact. Harry, Hawthorne. Severus wakes confused and aroused and angry. His bedsheets twisted around him, his sweat soaked through his nightshirt and into the mattress. _Goddamn you, goddamn you both._

 _I can teach you how to brew glory, bottle fame, and even put a stopper in death._ But not life. Severus Snape could not, for all his magic, for all his brewing skill, he could not reach through the veil and pluck the dead from their graves. Once again, he wonders what good magic is to him. He stares at the snake’s corpse on the dresser, hair tangled and fury soaking through every pore.

 

* * *

 

Severus turns the page on the book in his lap. He can smell the whiskey from the glass on the table, from the glass in Hawthorne’s hand, as it rises and mingles with the other scents in the room. Whiskey and leather and old paper. Hawthorne paces slowly before the window.

“I don’t think he’s a hero,” Hawthorne says. Severus looks up from the page startled.

“Pardon?”

The younger man runs a hand through his sandy hair. “Harry Potter, I mean. You said he was a hero a few weeks ago. I don’t think he is.” He pauses and shoves his hands into his jean pockets, affecting a casual shrug that belied discomfort. “I just don’t really think anyone in war can be called a hero, I guess.” Severus raised one dark eyebrow.

“His Order of Merlin, _First Class_ , would appear to prove you wrong,” he growls. There is bitterness there but it feels more distant than usual, here in this room, with the warmth of the fire.

Hawthorne shrugs, “I mean, yeah. Some wars have to be fought and you gotta do what you have to,” he fixes those piercing eyes on Severus (eyes like sand dunes, eyes like grasscloth), “No one’s a hero in war.” There is nothing noble in war, he has learned this. He had been young the first time his innocence was taken. How many times has he stood facing an enemy (a man, a woman) and realized they were made of the same ash and clay? The stare that John Hawthorne has is the same empty, distant stare of all men taken too young, baptized in fire, and set adrift in the world. They are like and like. They are lost.

He picks his words carefully, “How would you know?”

“I’ve been a soldier.” A grim set to the full lips, jaw tense. Severus pictures the man and cannot reconcile accounts. Which war? His mind flits between wands and dark, bloodsoaked robes and sand-colored fatigues with air that smells like explosives and charred flesh. It is imperative that he knows. _He has forgotten something._

“For our war? Against the Dark Lord?” John Hawthorne taps his fingers as he looks out the window. He will not answer, they both know it. It does not matter if it had been in Scotland or a far-flung desert. All soldiers are wounded, they bear the same scars. Hawthorne is picking at the threads on his shirt and tapping his foot. There is a long uncomfortable pause.

“Tell me something else. Something good. Tell me your happiest memory,” Hawthorne says. Severus pauses. He picks one up and dusts it off like an old coin. He is fourteen years old. Mama and he have gone out to the lake. It’s a sunny day for once. A hot and sticky July evening and the air rushes past his face faster than he can fill his lungs with it. He turns his face into the air and the wind and water spray cut at him. The sun tangles in his hair. He is fresh, clean, alive. God, what a parody of that life that he now leads - rapidly approaching fifty years old with nothing to show for it except the lines under his eyes and wiry greyiron temples.

He thinks of another memory that has just formed. Here, now. This room with John Hawthorne close to him, breathing the same air. Has he been happier? He does not know. There are few moments to choose from.

“I don’t know,” Severus says, because he does not know how to distill these feelings into words. Because there are things he cannot say.

“Don’t know or won’t tell me?” Those sly eyes, that mischievous mouth. Severus is silent, he keeps his face as still as a warning. “Do you want to know mine?” The younger man pauses, shifting his weight. His eyes are like fires. Like burning stars and supernovas and Severus is not sure that he should answer. (Supernovas outshine their own galaxies, John outshines him.) He knows that these are not the careful questions they have traded, there is something fraught here. He is a funambulist on a tightrope and they are about to fall.

_Don’t say it._

“When you ate three pies upon your return last week and barely made it up the stairs?” He knows this is not the answer, he is deflecting. He wants to both barrel down the path and to sharply turn aside. His breath catches and he does not know which that he wants and which he does not want but he knows he wants _something_ so much.

“Snape.” Severus does not look up, he does not. His fingers twitch. He studies the upholstery stitching on his chair. He looks at the skin on his hands, the color of the underside of mushrooms, the color of dead carp. His hands are lined with age, they are not the hands to reach up to John Hawthorne’s face.

The footsteps come closer, they edge into his field of vision (brown leather shoes on plush red-gold carpet). They are mere feet apart. Their shadows touch. His eyes draw up like a magnet (he cannot be blamed, he has no control).

He looks into Hawthorne’s stare. Eyes the color of amber, of dirty rainwater, the sand at the bottom of the lake. How could he have considered these average and forgettable? They are rimmed with green moss and Severus can see something familiar there. They are seared into his memory. _What was I supposed to remember?_ He thinks about pulling the other man on top of him, bringing him to the edge over and over and over again until sweat dripped down Hawthorne’s staccato back and his throat was raw. (In his mind’s eye Hawthorne is on top of him, their fingers interlaced, skin melded into one flesh, head thrown back and mouth open.) The desire wells up in him white-hot as an explosion and desperate as a shuttle launch. He bites the inside of his cheek.

John breathes in, closing his eyes, and presses his lips to Severus’. Skin to skin, flesh to flesh. Hot and warm and this is it, this is God made flesh, this is the Rapture, the Divine, the purest of things. He covers Hawthorne’s mouth with his grasping one. He closes his eyes. In his mind, his lover’s hair is dark. In his mind, he is angles and toothy smiles and miles of tanned skin. Here they are, chest to chest, their hearts lined up and beating in parallel. (Severus will later feel guilty that Harry is his first thought.)

“Who are you?” He whispers, his black eyes burn like coals in the low light, “I went to the Records Hall in Diagon Alley. There is no wizard named John Hawthorne in Britain. You’re what - thirty? You didn’t go to Hogwarts, I would have taught you.” John Hawthorne smiled that ever damnable smile but Severus could not tell what lay behind it.

“Don’t ask me, I can’t tell you,” John breathed, pressing small feathered kisses to the curve of Severus’ neck, “and I won’t ask you the things you can’t tell me.” Severus does not have to ask what John means. The question is always there and it is one he cannot answer. _Why did you join him?_ He has answers and they are all incomplete - he was young, he was foolish, he didn’t understand. He tries not to think of that infernal night when he had been seventeen and vodka and firewhiskey had rushed through his veins. There had been a group of them, all of them young men. He had felt the excitement course through him as the Dark Lord’s hard voice and hard eyes had crested over the din, promising a _path_ , promising _respect_ , promising _redress_. (He had not realized how they would be used, that he would be placed under _Imperio_ and forced to torture a young man not a week later. He had rushed into the shower after, sick again and again all over his front, while he rubbed his skin red and raw trying to remove the dried blood until his own sprouted up in its place. This is when he learns that not all choices can be undone.)

His book falls to the floor forgotten. (He will apologize to John Milton later.) John Hawthorne is pressing into him like a starved man. His lips are soft against Severus’ and he runs his tongue along the seam and Severus parts for him like the sea, like a flower unfurling to the sun. There is a small moan as electricity sparkles up his spine and the crown of his skull. It is his moan, his sound. The chair rocks under their shared weight but John has him. In his broad hands and broad shoulders, Severus is safe and surrounded (when has he felt this way before?). He bumps his nose against John’s as he reaches and seeks for more touch. He did not know he was so thirsty. He has no art, no knowledge, love has never been a language Severus was fluent in.

John rocks his hips against Severus’ and he feels the equal hardness pressed like a brand into him. John’s hands move over him, pressing into his chest, moving over his shoulders, all the while his mouth is kissing fierce psalms into his skin and Severus can hear the _holy holy holy_ in his touch. (He is surprised, there is nothing holy about him.) John’s hand is poised over his hips and Severus can feel the heat radiating off of his skin, through the fabric of his trousers, right directly onto his cock. (Thermal conduction, he thinks, apropos of nothing.)

“Can I?” John whispers, voice thick. Severus grits his teeth with need. He has not been touched by any hand other than his own in thirty years. (He is afraid he might die on the spot.) “Yes,” he hisses out as John’s hand sinks lower, makes deft work of his buttons, his zipper. His hand disappears into the dark fabric and is seared onto Severus’ skin (he will remember this later). Severus is good at overthinking but for once his brain is silent, for once he can forget and exist in only this single pure moment as John’s hand runs over the head and dips into the clear liquid pooling already, swipes it down along the heavy-veined underside and gives an experimental pump. “Oh God, fuck -” Severus whispers and he feels the curve of John’s grin against him, the moist hot air of his heavy exhalation. John’s hips are canting against his thigh as his hand is moving and Severus reaches for him, “Let me, please -” and he pushes John’s shirt up and pulls the waistband down and there it is, he aches to take and touch and fuck. He follows John’s movements and slicks his hand and begins to pulse to John’s rhythm. John is quiet but Severus hears the whispers against his ear, John’s tongue flicking his earlobe between words. “Fuck, fuck, fuck I need this, I need you, wanted this so much, so long -”. It does not take long (it has been thirty years) and Severus knows he is hurtling at lightspeed. He comes with a soft shout against John’s rut, staining his dark woolen pants, John’s hand slick with come tasting of seagrass. John follows suit shortly after. Severus’ eyes are wide, he watches the man’s face contort into pleasure, mouth slightly agape with furrowed, sweat-sheened brow. (He wants to wipe the sweat-soaked hair from John’s forehead, he wonders if that is too intimate.)

 _Don’t speak._ He wants to stay here in this long measure. John’s coat drapes around them both, it is French grey and heavy with the scent of hay and Irish wool, lined in crimson silk and Severus can, with his hawknose, pick out the scents that make up John Hawthorne. Books and grass, sandalwood and heavy with peaty, smoky Scotch whiskey. (He has wondered what Harry Potter would smell like, taste like as a man who’d been allowed to live to thirty years old. He is arrested instead at seventeen. He would always smell like wool and cheap soap, treacle tart and butterbeer. And later, later still like dirt and putrescine.)

The sweat cools on his skin as they catch their breath, the sound loud and harsh in the quiet room. The fire pops. Severus watches with dawning horror as John’s eyes clear and become distant, focused.

“Shit,” John says. He pushes himself back, away off the chair. “Fuck,” he scrambles up and away.

Severus had said many a sadistic thing in his lifetime; for once he is at a loss for words. He slowly puts himself back together. Pulls the jacket shut, buttons his shirt to the top. The heaviness of the Hall sets in as the silence creeps back and lays steadily. Something is listening. He looks around but sees nothing.

_Curse you, John Hawthorne._

(When Severus was a boy, he saw a man get caught in the riptide. He knows that it is as quick as a monster’s grasp, there one minute and gone the next. He knows to beware of those rocky inlets where you see no waves. It is the quiet surface to fear. Even the strongest swimmers get swept somewhere out to sea. This is how he was caught, brought down into the water’s depths. It only takes the right tide to bring a man down, into the dark, where magic does not reach.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Part III:  
** **Some Stories Are Better Left Untold**  
  
_Valencia_  
_with your blood getting cold on the ground_  
_Valencia_  
_and I swear to the stars_  
_I'll burn this whole city down_  
The Decemberists, Valencia

_March 2009_  
_Cornwall_

Morning dawns calmly. He lays unmoving in his bed, the sheets twisted around his body and sunlight beating onto his eyelids. He can see the dull red of his own skin, the snaky capillaries running across, and tenses slightly with the memory of the night before.

The dining room is empty save Jack (picking at oatmeal and a bowl of fruit). The chair at the head of the table is empty. _John’s chair._

“Will Mr. Hawthorne not be joining?” He asks. Ida gives him a long, searching look, “No, I thought he told you. He was called away late last night to America. I’m not sure when he’ll be back but it sounds like it won’t be for some time.” Severus’ blood ran cold. Hawthorne had run away. He had been there and for a moment there had been a connection and then - what? _Nothing._ “I expect we won’t see him again until summer, Severus.”

“I - I understand.” He nods. “I … must take care of something. I’ll be a bit late joining Jack today. I’ll meet him after breakfast.” Ida looks at him with too-sympathetic eyes and he loathed her in that instant, “Of course.” He needs to get out, to breathe fresh air. His collar feels tight and chafing. He swallows. He swallows again.

He takes to the paths. The miserable beginnings of springtime had arrived. He cast equally withering and ineffective glares on the crocuses popping through the packed snow. He preferred to take walks in the night when space, that old nosy ingrate, peers down on him like a lab specimen in a bell jar. Space, cast outward into nothing. Fuliginous. He felt an edged thrill when the sharp wolves raise their heads in alarm at his step, his breathing always easier in the moment of inspiring fear and caution. (He wants to cut first, before his opponent. A good defense, as they always say.)

His misery knows no bounds. _It is for the best_ , he thinks. He doesn’t know how to do kindness or love anyway. His father had smelled the queerness on him when he was thirteen. Had somehow smelled it through the old man’s sweat and coal-stained undershirt, his beer-soaked breath. Had named him _soft_ and _queer_ and _faggot_. He cannot separate the feeling of his father’s disgust from his own needs. When he thinks of a future, any future, with Hawthorne (or, in another world, with Potter) he knows that he is the sooty darkness that would ruin it. He should not drag others down with his perversions. It is his fault. His foulness. His monstrosity. He has always been aberrant and deviant. His father was right, he should have been drowned at birth. _Nasty little thing_. (It aches still, all this time later.)

_It is for the best._

(He wonders what the first tallymark was. The first crime. Was it his own? Or was he being punished for something inherited, some ancestral wound so long ago? He remembers the punishments first and his own cruelty arriving only later.)

 

* * *

 

John Hawthorne returns sooner than the house had anticipated. He comes bearing piles of gifts from his trip to Istanbul and a hard, callous laughter. He is not alone. A group of five come with him. It grates on his nerves. He hears them around corners, their affected voices floating out of rooms. They arrive on a Thursday night, the miserable lot of them. Hawthorne introduces the group to Ida in the hall. From a concealed alcove on the stairway landing above, Severus watches Ida’s smile thin as the group leaves their coats and luggage all over the floor and is introduced to two worthless male friends of Hawthorne’s and three equally useless ladies. Severus does not bother to commit their names to memory. He does not care. (John kisses the cheek of the blond woman near him. Severus nearly breaks the banister.)

 _It was nothing between you_ , he reminds himself. _It meant nothing_. His fury arches like electrical sparks. _How dare you. How dare you touch me like that, like your goddamn useless port in a storm._ His back is tense and he can feel the muscles knotting up between his shoulder blades.

Even Jack is quiet and avoids John. They keep to themselves in the library. Jack is distracted and agitated, constantly clicking his pen. He raps on the desk, bounces his foot, stares unhappily out the window.

Ida enters. Her face is dark with headlines. She looks at them with a grim countenance, “John’s requested you and Jack tonight at dinner.”

 

* * *

 

The party gathers in the drawing room after dinner. While Hawthorne picks up and twists a pool cue in his hands, inviting the others to a game, Severus draws into a chair in a dim corner. A book lies open on his lap, his fingers working at his temples, trying to dispel the headache growing there.

“Hey, over there. Join us for a game,” Hawthorne says. Severus bites the inside of his cheek, Jack looks up from his book. “Besides, don’t you want your gifts?” The teasing runs harsh in Hawthorne’s voice.

“Yes, please, gifts!” Jack is thrilled at the prospect, “Did you bring one for Mr. Snape?” Severus shifts uneasily.

“Ah,” Hawthorne says, eye glittering, “Would Mr. Snape like a gift?”

“There is nothing I require.”

“Surely, nothing at all? Nothing can tempt you?” God, he wants to smash that face. This mocking is intolerable, Hawthorne knows it. He is dancing just on the razor’s edge.

 

* * *

 

“Should I marry Miss Packard, Mr. Snape?” Hawthorne asks, danger dances in the set of his jaw. His eyes are bright in a strange way. Ice floods through Severus’ veins. He thinks of Maria Packard, her blond curls and easy eyes. They would, of course, make a beautiful family and Severus is sick. Bile rises unbidden to his throat.

“As you like, Mr. Hawthorne,” He says, keeping his voice even and never looking up from the papers on his desk. It was a lesson plan for the week detailing Jack’s continued study of physics and light refraction. He had read the same sentence three times without a hint of comprehension and the ghost of a headache was starting to form behind his left eye. He rubbed his temple. “She would make a fine mistress of the Hall.”

“Wouldn’t she though,” Hawthorne says. Severus doesn’t like the glitter in his eyes. There is something very off about him. Suddenly he is uncomfortably aware of the tales of Reichenbach Hall. _We do not go there after dark_ , they had said. Hawthorne is taunting him. No, he had made this his home now, he will not budge. He will not give any indication that John Hawthorne and his choices have any effect on his being.

Severus presses his mouth together into a thin line as Hawthorne slams the door behind him with a satisfying clang. _It does not matter to me what you do or do not do, John Hawthorne._

Later still, he passes Ida on his way back to his rooms. His face is a storm and Ida frowns and sighs, “I know, Severus. I hate when he gets like this. It isn’t often but once in a while, he’ll come home in a right state, with all kinds of horrible people. Give it a week and, mark my words, he’ll have cast the whole lot out, lock himself up in his room with a bottle of whiskey, and not come out for days.”

_This is unconscionable, it cannot be bloody tolerated._

“Why the hell do you put up with this?” He asks. This is beyond what he can handle, his nerves are raw and exposed. Ida’s pale eyes look at him with a soft sadness.

“He saved my life once,” She says and pauses. She turns away to pick up the tray again, “And he’s a good man regardless. He just has these moods. The doctors said it was from his days as a soldier. You don’t really get over that.”

Severus closes his eyes. He focuses on breathing those his nose in measured time. _Breathe in. One, two, three, four, five. Breathe out. One, two, three, four, five._ Ida softens, “He really isn’t all bad, Severus. Just give him some time.”

Severus is tired of forgiving men who make mistakes.

 

* * *

 

Hawthorne does not invite Severus to dinner with the party again. Tonight, instead, he has withdrawn to the sanctuary of the library. He looks up from his book as he hears the door click open and low voices tumble in. He hears the low rumble of Hawthorne’s baritone and a higher female voice. He rises, setting the book to the side, and peers through a gap in a bookcase. He can see everything.

John bends slightly over Maria, one wide rough hand reaching up to cup her face. He can nearly feel the ghost of the other man’s breath, his late-day stubble, as it skates over the woman’s fair cheek. They whisper. He cannot quite make out the words, nor does he want to. Instead, he remains where he is, pressed against the bookcases and silently death gripping his book. _Even out the breathing. One, two, in, out._ He makes himself as silent and unobtrusive as possible. His heartbeat sounds loud enough to wake up all of England. His jaw clenches when John leans in to kiss her. He thinks his molars might crack.

Whispering and laughing, the pair pull the library door shut with a solid click after. He breathes a sigh out in the sudden contrasting silence. His shoulders are beginning to knot up, his breathing is speeding up. He swallows, once, twice, three times. His eyes close. _Go to bed, Severus. Just go._

_It doesn’t matter._

He gathers his things. The book, the journal, the pen. He puts the desk lamp out. As he draws near to the door, Severus pauses. There is a forgotten wine glass left on the table. He stares at it for a heartbeat, tired and drawn.

The door opens, There is nowhere to hide. Hawthorne enters, brushing a piece of lint from his jacket, and bending already to get the forgotten glass. _Don’t make a sound._ Severus catches his breath. They lock eyes and he can feel the moment that the cylinders click for the other man as he realizes that Severus has been there the entire time. He has seen everything.

“It’s not what you think,” Hawthorne says. _It doesn’t matter._

“I don’t think anything,” Voice like ice, like a blade. He removes all emotion. _It doesn’t matter._

“No? Just watching from the shadows like a creep, Snape?”

“Fuck you,” he hisses and the dam breaks. He _cannot_ stand this, cannot stand being taunted. (All of the memories surface. The four boys, loathsome Gryffindors. _Oh, no, is Snivvy upset?_ His father, drunken. Voldemort, who knows his desires and leads the laughter.) His hands curl into fists before he realizes what is happening and suddenly his hand is striking against John Hawthorne’s face, right across the nose, the mouth. It is satisfying and thrilling and oh my god he wants to do that again. Hawthorne stands there, mouth agape and pomegranate blood dripping from his split lip. There is already a bruise forming to the side of his cheek and his eyes are wide and fascinated.

“What the fuck, Snape -” _Shut up, shut up, shut up._ Severus isn’t sure he is in control any longer and he feels himself slam into John, feels John’s body hit the wall. The other man is hot to the touch and firm and splendidly solid. His wide hands fist with desperation and fury and he is there, at the limit, he cannot stand this. He thought he was hitting John and is surprised instead to find his mouth on John’s mouth, sucking the air from the other man like a Dementor’s kiss. John is keening, _what the fuck_ , and gripping Severus’ skull tightly. John’s fingers catch and tangle in his blackgrey hair. He is holding him right there and fiendishly sucking at his lip, taking big gulps of air from the breath they are sharing. Severus cannot remember how they got here, he is holding onto John for dear life. John who is rocking against him, his eyes dark and wide and who is whispering _oh my god, oh my god, oh my god_ over and over like a rosary.

He pulls roughly at John’s hair, tilting the other man’s face up. “You like this,” he hisses, “you want someone rough with you.” John is nodding wildly, his eyes blown wide and ravendark with want, crying “Yes, yes, yes, Snape, yes, _please_.”

“Please, _what_?” He needs to know, he doesn’t know.

“Please, anything.” John reaches up to him. But Severus’ rational mind is catching up. He sees blond Maria again, John’s taunting face. He will not be made a mockery of. He has nothing but his shreds of dignity and those he will keep intact. His hands push John back, he lifts his head.

“Figure it out,” he says harshly. He wipes the spit from the side of his mouth and breathes. He turns and slams the library door behind him. He can hear heavy breathing and isn’t sure if it is John’s or his own. _It doesn’t matter_ , he repeats and stalks down the hall to his room. Once there he pulls the door hard shut and performs a collection of locking charms. His body is as taut as a wire.

It is a matter of ridiculousness that, at this age, his body still has _needs_. His arousal pummels him, his tyrant of a cock standing at attention. He will not get any rest if he doesn’t take care of it so he takes himself into hand with annoyance and a slap of spit. He tries to think of nothing yet John Hawthorne’s face rises unbidden into his mind. (Then, as his climax takes him, he sees an unwelcome Harry Potter, young and victorious on the Quidditch pitch with sticky, sweaty robes clinging to his teenage form. Severus stutters silently as he spills into his own fist. He is silent with shame as he wipes the evidence away with an old shirt. He had not meant to. He was not a monster. Not _that kind_ of monster. He was _not_.)

 

* * *

 

He is restless and follows Jack around the grounds. Through fen and bog. The lake looms large in the distance and Severus skirts it, always aware of its boundaries. (He is terrified of the deep and what lives in the dark, choppy waves. He has never learned to swim. He does not dangle his feet in black water for fear of what might be there to wrap around them. This is thalassophobia. Severus knows many phobias. They gather in the folds of his brain. He can list them: _claustrophobia, nyctophobia, necrophobia_.)

It is increasingly clear. He has to get out. There is nothing for him here. In his mind, he is already composing his resignation letter. He pours all of the vitriol into his fantasy draft and cuts from it later.

_Get out while you can. Save yourself first._

“Come in,” the voice calls from within the office. He steps in and John does not look up from his seat at the desk. (It is interesting seeing him like this, seated at the wide mahogany desk, his tweed jacket pressed, dark eyebrows furrowed. He looks every inch the English country lord and Severus wonders how many faces there are to John.)

“Consider this my letter of resignation.” He passes the tightly-gripped parchment over Hawthorne’s desk. The other man picks it up and his eyes skate down the spidery black scrawl. As John reads, the color drains from his face. He looks up and Severus notes with some measure of satisfaction that the other man has not healed his lip, it is still split and ugly, slightly purpled, evidence of their contact.

“No, you can’t go.”

“You cannot forbid me.” Severus hisses, “You are my employer, not my jailer.” His jaw aches, his molars grind together tightly. (He is running out of muscle relaxant potions.) “I’ve advertised for a new position.”

“What about Jack?” The other question goes unspoken. They can both see the shape of it in the moisture of the air. _What about me?_

“That is not any of my concern, Mr. Hawthorne.”

“At least - stay for Jack. Just until I can find a replacement.”

He arches a tar-black brow, “I understood Miss Packard wanted to send the boy to a boarding school.”

“Damn Maria,” John hisses, “I don’t give a fuck what she thinks.” Those hands, again, tangle in his treebranch hair. “I made a promise to Jack. I know what it’s like - to be alone and have no one. No family, friends. Nothing. I _promised_ him.”

"Go away, Snape." Hawthorne waves his hand, the other covering his eyes. "Please, just go." He knew that he could fly off in a thousand different directions at once. He would rend the sky with dagger-shaped pieces of his flesh. His emotions course through him. His breathing comes faster and faster and faster until he knew he would either explode or scream. Hawthorne’s eyes bore into his, a sea adrift in fog.

“Good riddance. To you and to that cursed screaming harpy of a servant of yours.”

“Screaming? What did you say?” Hawthorne asks, his face suddenly grave. A strange face yet again, unseen before. (Severus wonders how many facets Hawthorne has.) He looks impossibly older in the light and peculiar shadows play across his cheekbones.

“June’s screaming. The blasted woman is seriously unhinged and is a menace. She’s left a snake in my bed and I’m certain a dead bird when I first arrived.” Hawthorne pales as Severus speaks. He closes his eyes for a long beat. He is silent for a moment. (Severus knows the look of a man wrestling with himself. He has done this dance before.)

“I’m sorry for what I’ve done,” he says. Severus opens his mouth to sneer, “Wait. I am sorry for the last week. I am not sorry for what happened between us.” Those strange eyes again, like sand, bore into his. They have the odd power of arresting him. “I don’t regret what happened but I put you in danger and I do regret that. And I will take care of it.” He bit his lip (chapped, peeling), “Please stay a bit longer. At least until I can get someone new as a tutor for Jack. I’ll explain everything. I owe that to you.” He chuckles a bitter laugh, “You aren’t going to like it.”

His weakness has always been knowledge. He wants to know. It is a craving, a deficiency. It has gotten him into trouble before. It wasn’t that he had wanted to use the Dark Arts nor be a Dark Wizard. He’d simply wanted, coveted that knowledge. It is unbearable that something should be locked away. He gives a short nod. He will stay. (He has nowhere to go.) He will hear the end, the explanation. He needs to know the key to the riddle of John Hawthorne, who is beautiful and ordinary and maddening.

“No, I very much doubt I will,” Severus agrees. But he will stay. For now.

(On the seafloor, there are storms. It is hard to see here, from far away on the shore. Great powerful eddies of current swirl over the ocean bottom. The silt, sediments, old rotten bones are stirred up into dust storms that reach for hundreds and thousands of meters. You can see nothing. Do not open your mouth to scream for you cannot breathe. Severus cannot breathe in the benthic storm. If he opens his mouth, the dust like asbestos will climb in and shred his lungs from the inside out.)

 

* * *

 

April is the cruelest month they say. The kettle blows. He steeps the Earl Grey tea in a chipped mug. There are no matching ones. The wooden table is battered and wobbles as he sinks back into the chair, stirring. A few long minutes pass. He watches the room begin to darken, the unadorned pale walls sinking into long shadow. The heat has long since disappeared from the tea. He has forgotten to drink it again. He stares off into a dark corner, thinking of how to cut himself away.

(He had learnt to be quick and forceful in his movements with the knife. He knows how to keep a slice clean, so it would not be infected and would heal well. He knows how to cut the jugular or the carotid effectively so a man would bleed out in seconds. Severus does not have much kindness to offer but this is what he can give - a clean death, a quick death. It takes days, even weeks, before he feels the impact of his work. He can dispatch a man as effectively as a cook takes a lobster. Only after, long after, does Severus know he has lost another piece of himself. Only then does he mourn and bite his lips until they bleed, get drunk on firewhiskey, and trash his sitting room.)

He notices there is a book left open on the secretary desk. It is a very old copy of _Faust_ , left open to the sale of the protagonist’s soul. For some reason, he feels incredibly uneasy when he handles it. It is far dirtier than any other book in Hawthorne’s pristine collection. The old pages nearly crumble under his professorial touch. The marginalia is disconnected, cramped, and strange and not in John’s familiar, loopy script. Where did this book come from? He has certainly not seen it on his prior perusals of the library. It must have come in with John on his last trip. Something in him dislikes it _intensely_. He cannot finger why. The book had a terrible malodor, like rotten meat left in the sun. A fresh wave of the noisome smell rose with each turn of the page, assaulting him afresh. Old books rot; they are made of organic material and break down in the presence of decay enzymes. But this loathsome scent is something very, very different and a small shiver shoots from his crown to the base of his spine.

_John didn’t leave this here._

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes in a dead sweat, disoriented. Slowly he surfaces, his brain separating dream from reality. First comes the bed, the walls, the furniture barely visible in the dark.

Then the strange, twisted face at the dark window. It raises a hand to the glass, longfingered and knobby. He stares for a moment. Smoke arrests him. He can smell it on the back of the air and knows instinctively that this is not the safe, banked fires of the hearth. There is danger and wildness. _John_ , he thinks.

“John!” He screams, dry-throated, and bolts for the hall.

Severus knows how fire can break a man. He has never needed to consult second-hand accounts. Too often he has knelt at the foot of a master while the air sang with the sick perfume of charred flesh. Conflagration. The fingers of the fire may not reach skin but death can instead travel on its breath, on the back of smoke. The burns are hidden away, tracing mandelas down an esophagus, spinning cartwheels in a nasal cavity. Severus hacks at the door to John Hawthorne’s room. He has forgotten his wand. Instead, he smashes an old iron finial against the wood, shattering it.

He broke down the remaining wood, cinders flew at his face. Distantly, he registered pain. All that mattered was that John Hawthorne was there, somewhere in that death trap. Distantly, he registered the word love. _Ironic, isn’t it, Severus. You would love two men and they would both be worm food before you got the courage to tell them. You goddamn, godforsaken mongrel coward._ He knows that no matter what John has to tell him, he will stay. He will not leave. He loves him. _Goddammit._

The large room was choked with smoke and a considerable beam had fallen across the bed. Hawthorne’s unconscious form lay prone on the mattress, his skin noticeably pink. Scarlet ran from a gash on his forehead and in rivulets down the curves of his cheekbones. It fanned out on the linen pillow like a macabre delta. Severus is sick with fear, he feels his stomach clench and his breath accelerate. He grabs the prone body. (His hands, wide and long-fingered, have always been strong. He prays they are strong enough to carry John.)

Someone near him is throwing water on the fire. Severus does not know who it is, where they have come from. Later, when he remembers, he will realize that he had sounded the first alarm. Everything comes in shadowy patches, thick with smoke. He does not remember how he got John Hawthorne to the neighboring bedroom. How he is pressing soaked washcloths with shaking hands to soot-stained skin and praying a profane supplication. Severus has never claimed to believe in God but here he has no one else to speak to. (There are no atheists in foxholes.)

“Please, God, if you do one thing for me. Wake up, you motherfucking, goddamn you, you fucking bastard, wake up -”

He lays his impatient hands on Hawthorne’s prone body, palpating the flesh for wounds. The Dark Lord had not approved of spellwork and preferred for his men to inflict their torture by hand, so he knows what a broken bone feels like beneath the skin. He can tell a transverse fracture from a greenstick by the way the bone shifts under his thumb, by the way a man winces. He has caused these. (He has healed these, later, so that he may break them again and again.) He knows. His hands make quick work of Hawthorne’s limbs, running down his arms and legs and reading them like Braille.

He reached out to brush the soot from Hawthorne’s face. Something is wrong. Odd, his hair looked much darker. _The glamour_ , he thinks. Of course, John is unconscious and the glamour would have disappeared. Severus dampened a washcloth in the basin and began wiping at the other man’s face. Something emerges. A rough spot on the forehead. There, there it was. A lightning bolt scar. _Godfuckingdammit_. The pieces click and fall into place. He knew instinctively that this was the same man, the magical signature that hovered around him was the same. It has grown and changed some in the past ten years, evidence of how time might change a man. How the hell had he missed this? His heart clenched. His fingers dug into the man’s bicep, the skin paling from pink to white and back again. What an odd feeling, the simultaneous rush of righteous fury and relief. Severus wanted to both clutch the unconscious form to himself and to murder Harry Potter on the spot. He can see the half-moon indentations on Potter’s skin where his fingernails pressed in. He tenses his jaw, trying to stave off the unwelcome wave of nausea that rises. _Fuck you, Potter._

It is a good hour later that Potter finally stirs to wakefulness. Severus sits in a chair in the opposite corner of the room, his hands white-knuckled and gripping the armchair tightly. He waits silently as the bleak-haired man blinks owlishly and slowly looks around the room before realizing that his eyes would not focus. Harry’s hand reaches up as a reflex to touch the bolt-shaped scar.

“Fuck,” Potter says, he winces and tests his body. (Severus has spent the last hour in that chair, regarding that body, seeing what ten years have changed. Potter is broader now, still shorter than Severus. The chin has squared off, his stubble is dark and thick.) He takes in the lines around Potter’s eyes and mouth. Deeper now. _Where have you been?_

“Indeed, Potter.” He sneers, “Your eloquence never fails to astound me.” His fury is unmatched. He breathes harshly. In the back of his mind he hears a whisper of Albus Dumbledore, “ _Destroy nothing you cannot fix_.” Severus cannot, he does not care. His anger is glorious, he is delighted in his indignation. A vast array of possibilities splay out before him, endless with ways to cut Potter, to hurt him. He aches to slice with his words, reduce Potter to nothing. He wants more, to break his body. He doesn’t want his wand here, not this time. Severus wants to use his hands, his fists, wants to smash into Potter and fully make him feel his anger and his wrath and _how the fuck can you do this to me_? (Severus is nearly sobbing; he has not cried in years. He wants to bury his face against Potter’s chest, his neck. He wants to gather the man up and cry absolutions into his body, that blessed body, that blessed boy who is here, who is intact, who is _alive_.)

“Jesus, Snape, I-”

“What was it?” He spat, “Wanted to have a laugh?” His dark eyes were wild as a panicked horse, “Make fun of an old, hated teacher?” His fury mounted, he could taste it frothing in the back of his mouth. His fingers twitched with the urge to take the moment, to take Harry, and to shatter him. To freeze him instantly in liquid nitrogen and drop him onto concrete to shatter into thousands of microscopic pieces. To rend him, limb from limb from lying mouth, with a white-hot flame of an acetylene torch.

“No,” Harry says (his voice smoke-strained, Severus would crawl over coals to reach him), equally furious. It showed in every line on his face, the set of his shoulders. “Please - stop. I just wanted to talk to you for once.” He looked away, “We’re both exiles from our own world, I just thought you might understand. I - I wanted to just talk to you without you assuming who I was for _once_.” Harry ran a shaking hand through his hair, “Christ, fuck, Snape, I just wanted to talk to you. This wasn’t a trap.”

“Why?” His pitch black eyes narrow, “Why the hell would you hire me? _Me_ , Mr. Potter, if not in order to mock me.” His suspicion hovers, almost tangible, in the air between them. There are ways to the truth. He does not need a wand to cast _Legilimens_ and to plow into the boy’s mind, scattering his sandbag defenses like toy blocks. There is a small bottle of perfectly clear, perfectly crystal Veritaserum sewn into the lining of his luggage. He could fetch it now, tip Potter’s head back (long neck exposed to the air), and watch Potter swallow down the drops and spill out every half-hidden truth. (Severus is afraid Potter is telling the truth.)

Harry sighed, running his hand through his dark hair, “We’re both outcasts. I thought we might understand each other. I don’t know. I saw your application and I just….needed to see you.” There is a strange silence between them. The activity of footsteps in the hall to put out the fire had long since ceased.

“No, Mr. Potter, you can return to the world at any time you choose. You, of all people, are not a bloody pariah. To pretend that you have _anything_ in common with me, with what I’ve been through, anything at all -”

“Shut it. Just - stop. Will you?” Potter snaps, breathing heavily. He is coughing, the smoke still staining his throat and lungs. “I can’t go back there, you don’t understand.”

“Of course you can go back, you utter imbecile. The boy hero, savior of the wizarding world. There are _statues_ of you for Merlin’s sake.”

“God, why the fuck are you like this? I thought you and I-”

“What -” Severus’ voice is the edge of a knife, “What did you think about us? We will never be friends, Potter. Never -” He closes his eyes, holding thinly to himself. “Is this what you would have told me?” He hissed, narrowing his eyes. (There is danger in the angles of his body, the way he perches on the chair, the flaring nostrils.) Harry sighs, his shoulders slump.

"Do you want to know? Do you really want to know why I left?" Harry said, he looks up suddenly, his eyes bright and mad. Severus had never seen him like this even in the depths of the war, even fifteen and vicious, screaming into unhearing ears that the Dark Lord had returned. Not like here, wild and angry and holding on to sanity by the barest thread. "Come with me." Harry grabbed Severus’ arm and drew him erratically toward the west wing of the house. The air grew old and musty in these disused corridors. They both cough as they pick their way through dusty carpets. Harry stops finally before a heavy, padlocked door.

He knocked, “June, it’s me. Let me in.” Severus heard the footsteps pad over to the door and a heavy series of bolts drawn back. He realizes belatedly that Harry is doing the same from the other side. This was a room designed not just to keep everyone out, but to keep something in.

June’s lined face appeared in the open crack, “Alright, sir, but it’s a bad night. He’s in a state.”

He notices first that both Harry’s and June’s wands were raised and pointed at the bed. There came a loud hiss. There, housed and chained and warded, lay the mangled, breathing frame of Lord Voldemort. He stares in mounting horror at the twisted form. It (more creature now than human) lay across the cot, blood vessels pulsing under translucent skin, his eyes red as rust, lips drawn back to reveal a silent scream. (“Don’t let your hate fill you, Severus,” Albus had said to him once but his hatred fills him now. His lungs are sick with revulsion.)

 _Ssssseverussss._ The voice isn’t spoken, or is it? He hears it within and without, pounding inside his skull.

"There," Harry hissed, spittle flew from his lips. The wildness still in him. “Voldemort -- You Know Who -- is still alive.” He cannot look at the living skull, that magic-bound undead skeleton. He cannot look away. The cruel strength of the Dark Lord is still apparent in his fine yet severe bone structure (he had been a striking man once, when he had borne the name Tom Riddle), the broad and powerful shoulders, throat that could kill a man with a whisper. Severus feels his legs tremble with weakness and fear.

"Now you know the truth. I am his keeper." This living tomb, this half-dead, half-alive wretched creature. The pitiful, cruel bag of bones is grinning. Terror chokes him. “June isn’t who you’ve been hearing, she’s an Auror. It’s him. You’ve been hearing him. He’s getting stronger, he can get into minds.”

"What the bloody hell-?" Severus finds his voice. He breathes hard and panics for his wand, his hands instinctively patting down his pockets. “He’s bound, he can’t do anything,” Harry says, “I just increased the wards after you told me about the bird and the snake. But I can’t maintain this,” his stare is hard and furious on the ghoul in the bed. His expression could have flayed men alive. This fury is more than their own, he can feel Potter’s hatred joining his own in seething at the bound wizard.

Harry sagged and ran a hand through his dark hair. "I'm the last one," he finally said. "The last horcrux. When he tried to kill me, well, the first time, he put a bit of his soul in me. The bastard can't die as long as I'm still alive and I can't get the courage up to do it. That's me, now you know it. I’ve spent ten years looking for another way to break the horcrux.” His face is sick with misery, “There isn’t one. And I’m a goddamn fucking coward." (Severus has called Harry Potter many things, _coward_ has never been among them.)

Severus stares at the pathetic form in encroaching horror. "This is absurd, Potter. You can’t be expected to _sacrifice_ yourself."

Harry lets out a bitter laugh, "Don't you see? It doesn't matter. It isn't fair. It is what it is." He narrows his eyes and squares his shoulders. "But now I'm realizing just how close he came to escape. It's been selfish for me to keep him here like this. I need to end it. I'm going to end it. Everyone’s in danger if I don’t." His eyes close briefly. "You’re in danger.” Severus watches Potter as the younger man looks grimly at his unwelcome charge. This is another side of him, that wild magic rankling beneath both of their skin (this is Harry’s magic containing, this is Harry’s magic keeping them safe). Harry’s face is older than it has any right to be; ten years have taken their toll. Severus’ eyes follow the lines at Harry’s eyes, the corner of his mouth. His jaw is softer now than it was, his beard is growing in thick at his sideburns. He is animalistic, alert. Severus wonders what all the parts are, how the boy he loved and the man he was falling in love with could add up to a different whole, greater than its identifiable sum.

“So I guess I'm saying goodbye." _You goddamn fucking useless worthless miserable beautiful brave genius._

“Do as you will, Potter,” he sneers, “It’s no difference to me.” His blood sounds like a hurricane. He has never known so much fear.

“Please don’t-”

“You _lied_ to me.” _Don’t leave me again._

Harry sighs heavily, “Goodbye, Snape.” There was a forlorn sort of look in those familiar eyes, finally that long lost green (His eyes are different than Severus remembers. They are the color of lichen and lacewings.). “I guess I just want to say I’m sorry. I’m so - I’m sorry.” Severus searched his stare for a long moment with disbelief. Harry stretched his arm out to the twisted form, his fingers curling around the Dark Lord’s skinny wrists. There was a moment where Severus could not breathe and that he never would again. Something glinted in the horrible skull where Voldemort’s once-human face had been. His too-mortal brain could not process what he saw in those monstrous, evil features. Scarlet eyes, a smile carved from the beastly mouth. A loud snap cracked and Harry disapparated with Voldemort’s frail body. Severus half-expected to see a wisp of smoke in their wake but there was nothing.

The room was empty and felt strangely drained. Somewhere he heard a faint keening sound. It was a long time before he realized that it was coming from himself. He retched and was sick down the front of his robes. In his youth, he had been a choirboy and so he remembers wrath and he remembers punishment. He knows that angels are inhuman and unkind. The four-faced and seven-winged swords of God here to bear witness to his anger. Harry is a martyr and will follow Valentine and Pothinus to heaven. Not Severus, no. He does not know which circle of Hell will claim him in the end but he will be led in chains to the City of Dis and booked.

June is quiet. She looks at him with an alien empathy. “What the hell do you want?” he snaps. She says nothing, It doesn’t matter now. Potter’s singed hair can still be smelled; the acrid smell fills his nostrils. It will fade soon, as all things will. This is it then, he realized, this is how the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper. He is choked, he cannot stay here.

He Apparates back into that old, miserable grey-tiled kitchen. Carefully he casts every locking and warding charm that he knows. His thin back slumps against the kitchen table chair, for several long moments there is no movement but his chest slowly swelling and sinking. His head droops, black strands obscuring his vision. His head sinks into his arms, forehead pressed into the woodgrain. His fingers splay out, nudging the crystal salt shaker. He grips it. He remembers his father, who had picked them out. Suddenly, in one smooth motion he sweeps up and hurls the salt shaker against the wall where it shatters like rain. His fury and rage are unmatched and he is sick all down his front. He hisses and shrieks, his voice torn to shreds. He destroys seven plates, four bowls, and several mugs before he is exhausted. Heaving, he grabs the firewhiskey from the top shelf, pours himself a tumbler and drinks it down in a hurry. He wants more alcohol. He refills the cup. (He finds himself lying there in the morning. Still at the kitchen table, woodgrain pressed into his skin and a raging headache behind his eyes.)

 _What now?_ Here you go, Severus, back again to the dregs. Once before, in his lowest state, he had had Albus to lean on, who would buffer his storms and bring him (unopened, never-eaten) lemon drops. He had had a position at the greatest school of magic ever known. He had been a feared and respected Potions Master. Stained and soiled, yes. But it is not like now, where he is thrashing and cannot find the way up. There is no one to reach to, the shore is empty. He is alone with regrets and memories. (God, he wants a cigarette. It has been twenty-three years but an addict never forgets.)

(He had grown up near the shore and, like all lake people, he knows the look of drowning. He feels it now, that quiet dread, as his head tilts back, bobbing in the water and unable to catch a breath, his arms instinctively pushing at the water. Severus knows that drowning looks curiously like swimming and not at all like panic and that, since no one is watching him, the waves will soon cover his head and take him under.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Part IV:  
And Not All Ghosts Are Dead**

_“You remember too much,_  
_my mother said to me recently._  
_Why hold onto all that? And I said,_  
_Where can I put it down?”_  
Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God

_November 2009_  
_Spinner's End, Cokeworth_

It begins and ends at Lake Knucklebone of course. He’d always known that it would. Back to Spinner's End and away from the wide Scottish forests that buffer Hogwarts, back to this flat stretch of land that reaches out to a salty nowhere sea. He was born here, he will die here probably. God willing. This salty water that runs like blood through him. _I could cut myself and suck the sea from my skin._ Liquid seasoned with shipwrecks and dead alewives. They say Grendel lives down there, curled up at the bottom of the lake or nearby sea. His treebranch fingers grasp unlucky swimmers' ankles to drag them down. The bones remain long after the feast, bleached white and picked clean. Even in the July heat, the English jetstream pushes the winds across the Arctic, down over Scotland. He could feel winter on the back of the air. He walked to the fence to look out on the other side of the road, trash stuck in between the slats like baseball cards in bicycle spokes.

When a snake bites you, you have to suck the poison out. He knew that from one of the ambitious medical texts he'd read to pass the time as a child. In the medieval days, to rid the body of illness, they would bleed a man dry. He wondered if that could cure his heart. As if, perhaps, like a lovesick fool, he could remove all the blood from his body at once and replace it with something fresh and clean and untainted with something as awful as love. He concentrated, trying to feel each red blood cell as it rounded the curves of his arteries and veins. He willed his heart to stop. Traitorous thing, it beat on.

How do you mourn the dead? He could not mourn openly. To the world, Harry Potter had been dead for ten years. To the Muggle world, he'd only lost his employer in an unfortunate and sad blaze. _I miss you. I have tasted your flesh and it is my own._ Creature of overgrown moss, hair the color of November branches. Eyes like the underbellies of slugs. The cadence of his blood hummed ‘ _Harry, Harry, Harry_ ’.

 

* * *

He said he would never come back and he has come back. He walked through the door to Spinner’s End, past the hopeful yellow paint and the blue shutters. The stairway peels away to his left and he knelt down to the third step where his childhood hiding place was, where the carpet peeled away from the floorboard, and removed the rubber ball and toy soldier he’d placed there. The doors still slammed and reverberated in the way he’d remembered both waking and dreaming. At the end of the long hall, he saw the same kitchen table, pockmarked with green and blue tempera paint and bathed in grey light. There, like all the dead, his mother’s visage hovered at the edge of his vision. This, here was the spot in front of the refrigerator where he’d spilled the plastic cup of milk and his father had struck him across the mouth for it. Severus held his breath and touched his forehead to the cool windowpane. He can trace his mother’s sullen features in his reflection - the same patrician stare, the arched eyebrow, sunken eyes. We come from the Carpathians, she had said, where weakness is a death wish. A cool mist penetrates his skin and leaves him damp and clammy.

His mother’s bones are here, somewhere beneath the lake. He had gripped her long, sunbrowned fingers as she had looked out over Lake Knucklebone. “We are lake people, Severus,” she had said to him, in that reedy voice, “We belong to no one but ourselves and the water. Never let anyone have power over you. Never fall in love.” They had been allies then, back in the first years of his life. (The lines had been clear, there was he and Mama and then there was _everyone else_.) He does not remember when he crossed over to enemy in the match against the rest of the world. But back then he had held her hand in his fat child fingers and she had told him stories from his grandmother’s home in Wallachia. She had loved Lake Knucklebone because it had reminded her of Snagov. It twisted through groves and woods like a serpent, the waters deep and cold. In both lands the locals told stories about the lake steeped in awe and fear.

“Yes, mama,” he had said. He had seen the terror that love could bring. He did not know it firsthand with his eyes but he knew it through closed doors. He knew the imprint of it through raised voices that reverberated through wood, through broken crockery, through the bruises that had freckled his mother’s body like a connect-the-dots drawing. But Mama, her face hard and the lines radiating from her eyes, had turned then to the horizon and stared. She had seemed like a warrior to him then. _What though the battle be lost…_ Now, thirty-five years later, he gazes out at the lake. He wipes the exhaustion from his lined face with tired, cupped hands. He looked down at his hands and there they are full of loss. Albus Dumbledore, his mother, Harry Potter. _Harry_. He sees them all there, slipping through his fingers.

“ _Never take a man from his grave_ ,” his mother had said. It would have been better if he’d left Potter to the dead. He stands at the edge of the shore. He hadn’t been this close to the lake in decades. His shoes sink into the feldspar and silica sand. The waves decorate the leather with white froth and eelgrass. His mother had once lifted his chin here (he had been twelve years old and had no friends), and said “Never let another man make you feel inferior. Do you understand, Dragă? We are children of the Dragon, as my mother was. We are legend. We fought the invading Turks and held them back with our own blood. We are warriors, Severus. No one crosses us with impunity.”

He undressed and sat on the bed. He turned on the bedside lamp. On the table was an old novel by Milorad Pavic, a million mythical references and a man chasing a lost love through time and space. He reread the same sentence over and over, committed none of it to memory. He kept his wand tucked under his pillow; Severus Snape knows monsters are real. (His father, Tobias Snape, had left when he was nineteen years old. After he left, Mama didn’t talk about him much. She took her meals quickly, standing up in the kitchen at the old yellowed sink, stockings halfway on and her hair in curlers.)

Past the window, the Yorkshire sky loomed with heavy clouds. Dead leaves blew through the reeds against the house's gravel path. Like all Novembers, it held the promise of winter on the back of the wind. He had never liked Cokeworth before and this time was no different. It was the town that never forgot. They had left the husks of burnt out buildings from the German air raids of 1940. It was the one measure he liked; he rather appreciated something as battered as he was, with nothing shiny and hopeful to offer any longer. Beyond the town and the coal mines, Cokeworth was, both now and in his youth, mostly farmland. A riot of rotten stone barns and old marshes, choked with old secret-keeping woods and thickets.

He’s not sure why he’s come here of all places. He despises Cokeworth, the piss-smelling pubs and dollar stores. He hates how everything is patched and old. The pipes are old, the streets broken. Every house leaks when it rains. All of them, including Spinner’s End. It may be the worst of them all. (He shouldn’t have come here, to this museum of bad habits.) Getting a room at The Three Broomsticks would have been far more agreeable. (He’s punishing himself. That’s why he keeps dragging himself, his sorry self, back here to where he cannot forget where he came from. _This is the sewer I crawled out of. This is where I belong._ ) Sometimes he considers leaving and thinks for a moment of taking a room somewhere clean and new. But then he knows he will stain it. He will buy the wrong bleach, wash things the wrong way. They will come out grey and dingy and not white. He will chip the glasses. Forget to sweep. All places are Spinner’s End when Severus Snape is there.

There’s the damn kettle again. His cups are all dirty with forgotten teabags strewn about. He pours the hot water into a dirty cup and stares at it for several moments. He’s blanked on what he was doing. On what to do next.

When the winter grows close, Severus pauses at the door and takes Harry’s scarf from its hook. Black. Woolen. Musty in the lake-drenched air. The faint echo of the Hall. He inhales deeply and then sharply stops, panicking that he would consume all of the scent and it would be lost forever. He wraps the scarf around his neck. Sometimes, if he pretends enough, it almost works. When he is home, he leaves the television on, grateful for the noise.  
  
At first his sleep was dreamless. The nightmares came on a Friday night, two months and seventeen days after. Severus woke with a start, his heart pounded in his chest and sweat ran in rivulets from his brow to the tip of his nose. There would be no easy return to sleep. He left the lights on, made baked beans or spaghetti. He stretched his body over the couch as if to take up both his space and Harry’s. As if by being bigger, he could fill the void that had been left.  
  
In the nightmares, Harry always died. Severus saw it replay, over and over again, the cracked cranium and the blood seeping out from the boy’s skull with creeping, grasping reach. But those were the easy terrors. The worst came in a different form, easy and comfortable. Nightmares where Severus woke up from a terror and reached out across the bed, to Harry’s lean, pale body already gripping his hand, reaching for him. That same look, that same grasping, needy look that Severus had accidentally seen. That ache. But then Harry was above him, moving over him, his lips seeking. Wet. Soft. _I love you_ , Severus whispers and feels Harry's smirk against his skin because he knows already. Of course he does. (It is one of his deepest regrets that he does not know what Harry looks like when kissed. He’s never been imaginative and so it’s John’s face and John’s eyes and please, God, let him see Harry once in his sleep with that expression, please.)  
  
And then Severus wakes up. On those nights, he doesn’t turn the light on. On those nights he lays there, silent.  
  
_Love is supposed to be a happy thought_ , Severus thought and realized how wrong he’s been. Instead, his heart clenched within his ribcage and there is no salve that can give it comfort. He had grown up hearing that it was better to have loved and lost but now, as he mourned for Harry Potter a second time, he knew that was a bald lie. No, it was better before he knew the pressure of Harry's grip, before he had carefully cataloged the way his blush crept past his collar down his long neck. No, it is better to have known nothing and wished than to have had and lost.  
  
He wonders how Potter did it. He counts all the ways to die. (They had once seemed beautiful to him, now they terrify him.)  
  
Once, before his first murder, he had held such a romantic notion of death. The deceased laid out like Ophelia in the water, still as a Waterhouse painting, calm and serene. Dignified in silence, the final word with which no one could ever argue. Not like the reality - not like twisted limbs, lips that pull back from teeth like an orange peel from the fruit. He thinks of yellowed and grey-mottled skin, the putrid stench of decay, the seeping bodily fluids staining the surrounding dirt and floorboards. No, there was no dignity in death. There was only an argument already lost.

 

* * *

 

He is quite sure he is going mad. For one wild instant, he wonders if his grief could have manifested in cruel hallucinations, could have painted the dead into his vision, could have manifested that sun-drenched and dark-haired man here at his door, nervous hands twisting his hat beyond recognition.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, Potter,” Severus growls over gravel and broken glass. (Distantly, outside of himself, he hears his roughshod voice slipping into a coarse Yorkshire accent. He winces.)

Potter raises his head, exposing his strong naked Adam’s apple and more of that milky skin. Severus doesn’t know what to do. His hands ball into fists. He studies Potter’s cheekbones and straight nose. He knows the exact spot to strike to shatter the bridge. He knows how hard to strike to push the broken nasal bone up into Potter’s brain and kill him instantly. His fingers twitch, useless at his sides. (What good is his knowledge? He knows no gentleness.)

"How - How can you dare-" He rasps, his voice dragged over broken glass. "After everything, _everything_ you've done, Potter. You dare to come back from the dead _twice_." His face is white and spit flies from his lips in fury. The collar of his shirt is too tight and he claws at it to loosen it. _Breathe._ Harry looks up at him, "I had to - I had to finish it - I am so sorry." The dead boy (not so dead, now, living and breathing with a pulse in his throat) shifts uncomfortably from side to side, unsure how to stand. How do you rise from the grave a second time as Lazarus come?

"Don't you dare - don't you ever dare ever you godforsaken bloody-" The words disappear from his tongue, gone. There is nothing to say. Harry knows them all by heart anyway. _Don't you dare ever leave me again._ Harry steps slightly closer as if cautiously approaching a wild animal, "I would never, I promise."

“If you think I can forgive you for all you have dared to do -” He trails off. He cannot forgive Potter. (He loves him all the same.) Harry doesn’t say anything, eyes wide and biting his lip until the corner is ragged and dusky pink with blood. Severus has never been looked at like that. He tries to find the anger, the pity, the shame. _How dare you._

“I don’t expect that. Forgiveness, I mean,” Harry says quietly. “I just wanted to try.” He spreads his hands wide. “I’ve got nothing to lose right now.” His breathing is ragged, it comes and pulses so quickly that he feels a wave of nausea rising in his throat. The acid froths in his mouth. He cannot cry in front of Harry, he cannot. “We will never be friends, Potter,” he hisses. _Never. I hate you._

“No,” Harry says, his voice calm as the sea (calm as a riptide), “Not friends.” He crosses his arms, uncrosses them. Puts his hands in his pockets, takes them out again. _Stop fidgeting, you appalling cretin_. “We’re not that kind of story.”

_Don’t ask. Don’t ask._

“And what, pray tell, kind of story are we?” He doesn’t like how Harry has taken a step closer. _Claustrophobia. Philophobia. Phasmophobia._ These phobias are one and the same; do not come close. Do not, Potter, dare come any closer.

“I think it’s a love story,” the younger man whispers. Severus closes his eyes, breathing rapidly. There is an unfamiliar prickling at his eyes. _You miserable idiot._ (He is not sure if he means Harry or himself.) It would not do to cry in front of Potter. He has not cried in front of another living person in nearly thirty-five years.

“Not all stories have happy endings, you damn fool,” He frowns and laces his hands, long-fingered, over and over together. Harry stands up, he places his cool fingertips on the too-too-warm planes of Severus’ face. His heartbeat pulses, held in Harry’s hands. Maybe this is the way the universe works. Maybe it’s this simple. Their pupils lock, dark to dark. Harry leans in, tracing the roadmap of veins and arteries in the older man’s forearm. Severus swallows. _We were damned before we ever started._ “Potter, you monster,” he whispers and he feels the curve of Harry’s smile before it starts. Harry’s hands reach into him and take what they want, they leave what Severus needs behind. The rhythm of their breath synchronizes. He thinks of brimstone, he thinks of fire. Harry the Leo, scorching the dead leaves from his cold earth. Harry, the rhythm of his heart, the pulse sounding in his ears. _I hate you, I love you._

“This one can, Severus. You can have this. We can have this.” Harry hesitates before he tilts his head slightly and inhales a deep breath, his chest rising like a tide. He leans in further to close the space between them. (Later Severus would marvel on the simplicity of that, he had not known how to close those few inches, how to cross the divide.) For an instant, he feels nothing but chapped skin on his own and the warmth of Harry’s body heat slipping through the threadbare black robes. Then the world tilts on its own axis and Atlas kneels and Severus surges forward, knotting his skinny hands into Harry’s buttoned white shirt (open, there at the neck, by a few buttons, into a long stretch of fair skin that Severus will later discover). He does not really know how to do this but for once follows Harry’s lead and opens his mouth at the knocking of Harry’s tongue. _Is there a line between love and hate?_ He doesn’t know. He pushes and Harry falls back against the oak doorframe with a satisfying thud. Harry is insistent, his tongue licking at Severus' soft palate and Severus is keening and aching so much and his fingers are twitching in the fabric of Harry’s shirt with an infuriating and insistent need to grasp and bruise and pummel and to own. (He had wondered what Harry would taste like but knows now that Harry tastes like all humans do. He is both simple and clean, the empty flavor of skin and saliva. There is a vague saltiness and musky earth that comes from the sweat pouring from his neck. He licks his lips and tastes a hint of petroleum jelly left over from chapstick.) And so Harry kissed him and Severus fell in.

This is it, no, _this_ is the way the world ends. He doesn’t know how to do this so he gives in to every impulse. He cannot cover enough skin with his mouth, cannot cover enough of Harry with his mapping fingers. He wants to mark Harry up like an archeological dig site and to methodically cover every inch of Harry (his living, breathing body) with his own skin, his own mouth, his own tongue. _I will leave no part of you unturned._

Slowly his senses begin to reassert themselves. The coldness of the room moves in upon him in waves. He wills his fingers to unclench and their mouths break apart. Harry leans his head against Severus’ own, both breathing heavily and recycling the same breath over and over again between their lungs. Severus holds him at a distance, a foot away from his own body. His breath fogs up the younger man’s glasses.

“Go away, Potter.” His breath is ragged. He can hear his erratic and threadbare heartbeat. His temporal arteries throb. Harry doesn’t let his hands go. Severus doesn’t know when their fingers had knitted together, he does not remember. The boy thumbs over the veins and arteries in Severus’ wrist. He looks up again.

“I’ll be staying in town. I’m not leaving.” Harry whispers. “I’m not leaving you again.”

“Don’t bother me again, Potter,” he sneers. His eyes narrow.

(When Harry leaves that night Severus does not expect to see him return.)

 

* * *

 

When Harry returns, Severus is surprised.

He’d taken a room a few streets over. He comes the next day and the one after for dinner. The weeks pass, he spends increasing amounts of time at Spinner’s End. He always leaves late after falling asleep on the couch with strong legs curled up against Severus’, with one innocent kiss pressed to the older man’s cheek. It becomes an uneasy yet comforting truce, as they slowly discover how to live a quotidian life. (It is a measure of some small comfort when the petty bickering settles in. Harry prefers his tea brewed at far too high of a temperature and steeps it too long. It is a balm to his rattled mind that he can still insult the boy’s intelligence. They can feel the shift in the words, there is no malice in them. _Don’t you think you can collect your ridiculous teacups in one place for once in your life and stop leaving them all over my house?_ Harry is patient, he volleys back. _It’s only three cups, you miserable wanker. And you left four upstairs yesterday!_ He rests his hand on Severus’ arm when it goes too far, stilling Severus’ voice to silence.)

Severus gives up quicker as the days pass. He is not as bothered by that as he imagines he should be.

He is still unable to let Harry out of his sight, unable to say a kind word. He was used to shouldering grief, accustomed to carrying that spacious gap with him. He knows how to navigate loss but does not know how to handle Harry so close to him, so _proximate_ , and he feels constantly claustrophobic. “Don’t be so empty-headed, Potter,” he spits but he does not let go of Harry’s hand where he traces his thumb compulsively over the heartbeat, over and over and over again, looking for the constant proof of his life. He is afraid to let go. He doubts the evidence, he is uncertain that he is awake. He fears that this is not another one of his nightmares and he will wake up once again to a cold bedroom and an empty side of the bed.

(He notices but says nothing about how they carefully craft and clip their sentences to avoid using the other’s name. Neither _Snape_ nor _Potter_ feels correct yet Christian names seem, idiosyncratically, far too intimate. Instead, Severus thinks about it over and over again, wanting to hear his name from Harry’s mouth. The wanting to know how Harry would gasp it - _Severus!_ \- at the moment of climax is too much, he has never wanted so much and so fast. Severus does not know how to want with possibilities. He only knows how to stifle his want, to bury it deep, as there was never any hope to begin with.)

It is unbearable that Harry can see everything. Severus is forced from the decades-long cool disdain and perfected reserve that has formed his facade and Harry is there for every moment as a front-line audience. He can see every ragged gap, every white-eyed terror. He watches Severus with quiet, patient eyes as the other man wanders edgy as an abused dog and snapping at kind hands. When Harry is not in the room and not in Severus’ line of vision, he is unsettled and irritable. His eyes search shadows, over and over again, until Harry walks back in from the kitchen or the garden or the bedroom and settles down near him on the old sofa. Harry says nothing but simply offers Severus a cup of tea and he takes it (silently, his gratitude unspoken but it shows in the way their fingers brush and the way Severus swallows his cyanide words). He does not think he could bear it if Harry had said anything aloud, if he had expressed any outward sympathy. If Harry had said _I understand,_ Severus would have hexed him into next week. (Harry says nothing. He leaves his clothes on the counter and half-empty mugs of tea scattered throughout the house like a constant reminder of his presence.)

Severus is terrified, he is not sure how to get along. He is uncertain they can have a future. (He does not have one without Harry.)

Harry leans over and settles a chaste hand on Severus' knee, lightly squeezing. It is a touch meant to be gentle and reassuring but Severus’ thoughts are anything else. A warmth spreads from the contact point and fans out through his body as if carried on the backs of red blood cells. The tightness in his chest dissipates. He looks at Harry’s hand, the broad milky grip, and wants to reach out and cover it with his own. How do you learn new habits? His pride and old habits cling to his bitter misanthropy but it is empty. He wants so much but he does not know how to cross the divide. Hatred and cruelty are familiar mistresses and love is a strange planet.

He thinks of _Praya dubia_ , the second largest sea organism (as long as the blue whale, as thin as a broomstick). They are made for the deep, these long siphonophores. Their hydrostatic skeletons held together by thousands of tons of water pressure. Atmosphere is as alien as the surface of the moon, they have lived their entire lives underwater, in the deep, where there is no light. The weight of water is a part of them, knitting their bodies together, to come up for air is to die. In the light and the relief, there would be nothing to hold them, their bodies and bones would burst and demolish into transparent ooze. (He is there now, in the abyssopelagic layer. There is no light to guide him upward. He is afraid for his skeleton, he has never left the deep sea. Here in the starless night, he floats.)

“Come upstairs,” Harry breathes. _Oh. It’s as simple as that._

So he goes.

 

* * *

 

In the bedroom, he nervously unbuttons his jacket and drapes it across the wood-backed chair. Harry’s eyes follow him from across the room. His hands drop to the waist of his pants and he slowly unbuckles and slips them off of his pale-skinned legs with their soft, downy black hair. He grips the hem of his undershirt and pulls it over his head. (“Your hair looks incredible like that.”) Harry climbs over the bed with hands outstretched like a supplicant. He leans in and kisses the shell of Severus’ ear, down to his clavicles, his neck, his chest. So it is. The day and night meld together into one. They are timeless.

Harry traces the topography of veins on the back of Severus' hand. His hands, like the rest of his body, show his age. His skin is less taut than Harry’s, paler still, sinking into the valleys between bone and sinew. Can Harry smell the Capricorn in him, the ambition and the quiet reticence, easy brutality, at once distrusting and immensely loyal? The boy’s lionine Leo thrilled to the earthen man, _I will show the sun to your dark places_. Severus' dark soils reached out to the boy. _What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow, out of this stony rubbish?_

"How did it happen?" It was the question that had sat on his tongue for days. "How did you come back?" _What god must I thank?_

"I don't really know. Honest," Harry frowns and bites his chapped lower lip. The lips are much too thin, as they had always been, and Severus rejoices in his imperfections. Imperfections that had not shown in Hawthorne's bland appearance. "I went to a place. Well, King's Cross really - but it wasn't. It just looked like it but it was white. And Professor Dumbledore was there and he just... sent me back." _You took him away. You gave him back again._ It is peculiar how magic can become commonplace. Severus would not bat an eye if he saw a teacup turned into a toadstool or if he crossed paths with a hinkypunk. But the departed don’t come back. Death is supposed to be final, a one-way ticket. He knows the limitations to magic. He doesn’t know if this was man’s magic or God’s. He doesn’t care. _Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen._ (Severus is an atheist but he covers his bases.)

“This is insanity, Potter,” he says. The words are acid in his mouth. “You don’t want this, you won’t want this. I’m twice your age.”

“No,” Harry says, putting his hand on Severus’ arm. His eyes sharp and intent, brow furrowed. “I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what I want. I want you.” Severus closes his eyes and savors the words. He feels his chest swell, spikes of pleasure cresting from his belly. (He has wanted for so long.) He has never expected to hear such words from that mouth. _How long have I wanted you._ He looks at the younger man, sees the seventeen-year-old and the thirty-year-old simultaneously in that heart-shaped chin and tanned skin, chlorophyll eyes and that scatter of freckles brought out by sun across his nose. _I love you,_ his body says. He feels it fire in all synapses. It pours from him, from his sweat, his saliva, his blood. He hopes Harry can read it in his pheromones, he cannot say the words aloud.

“I’m not a good man,” He is not good enough. He is corrupt. His evils, his atrocities, will stain everyone. _No one should want you the way that I want you._

“I know what you’ve done,” Harry says quietly, “You know what I’ve done. You won’t scare me.”

“I will _ruin_ you.”

Harry is quiet and thoughtful. He brushes a hand over Severus’ open one. His fingers twitch. “You can’t, you know. That’s not how it works.” Severus says nothing, he disagrees. He is tired of arguing.

“I have to know,” Harry says, his eyes looking away. “Were you - were you in love with her?”

Severus sighs, “As always, Potter, you saw but you did not understand.” He pauses, “I loved her but I was not in love with your mother.” He picks at the hem of the sheets (greying, threadbare), “Perhaps it would have been different if I had had any interest in... Nevermind.” He watches as the tension goes out of Harry’s body, the lazy smile returns. It is like watching the dawn.

There, there he was, the boy who had lived and lived to tell about it. Severus stretches his palms across the slim chest, leaving the peaks and whorls of his fingerprints behind on Harry's skin. He works his hand across the head of the younger man's cock, his thumb dipping into the slit and spreading the slipperiness across the head. Harry bites his lower lip and closes his eyes tightly. _Talk to me, Harry._ But the other man is silent, his breath coming in short waves. Severus knows that silence. It is the sound of years of riding out orgasm in a boarding school dorm room. Harry comes all over his knuckles; Severus memorizes his features, afraid of his own forgetfulness.

"I thought of you," Harry says as the breath returns to his body. Harry, long-fingered. Harry, long-tongued. His eyes slope gently downward, heavy-lidded. Severus thinks of Ruth, Severus thinks of Rachel, _your people shall be my people _. "I sometimes forget that you're a separate person," Harry whispers. There is a gulf of things that Severus doesn't say that lay just beyond his tongue. How his heart expands when Harry reaches for him, the warmth in his stomach, how he wants to press their skin together until it melts and there was is separation. With Harry, the madness recedes. He feels placid, his heart thumps, the self-hatred and emptiness muted and softened.__

Harry presses his lips to the shell of the other man's ear. Severus shivers. Harry's hands nested in his hair and pulls the long frame down beside him. _I want to press into you, inside you. Feel your body. I do not understand how our flesh can rub together, layered, down at the cellular, the molecular level, and not interlock. How can my skin not be yours. Yours mine. You are fair where I am dark. Undergrowth. Mossy. Damp._ Harry leans over him and in an instant his hands were pressed against the narrow chest, his lips capturing the older man's. Severus’ nose twitches, he smells the cheap shampoo and the heady fresh sweat beading on his neck. He moves to the Gryffindor’s ear, his jawline, his clavicles. "I want you," he breathes, his hands moving of their own mind. Harry's knee slips between his thighs. "Tell me now," the boy breathes, his mouth moving against Severus' temple, "tell me now that you want this because I cannot stop."

" _Yes,_ " Severus says and Harry's breath hitches. He wraps his long fingers around the other's bicep, his dark eyes staring into Harry's. It feels like he is trying to hold Harry in place. Do not go far off. He tries desperately to memorize the moment. His hands run over Harry's shoulders, down his chest, his stomach, his solar plexus, his living skin. "Fuck," Harry says, the word rolling off his tongue holy as a sacrament. Glory, glory, hallelujah.

_I was born to Capricorn. Capricorn ascendant, sun in Capricorn. Ascetic and spare. You were born in the summer to fire. Earth and fire, earthy like the stain of my fingers on your skin. Fire, dancing and slipping through my grasp. Earthy, the taste of you in my mouth and in my blood. You are the taste of cleanliness, of razing and rebirth. The astrologers say that you will soften my sharp parts, the places where my bones jut out you will cover with flesh. Lay me down at night, teach the words to stop, the world to stop, the madness to stop. I am at one with the earth and you are the earth. I lay down with the lion. That old story._

It is strange and not strange, he thinks, these odd bedfellows finding comfort in each other, each wearing their fathers’ names as middle names and uncomfortably bearing their legacies. His black hair falls into his face, he pushes Harry’s own sweat-soaked locks from his brow. Harry murmurs in his sleep, drawing closer to Severus.

_No. We will never be friends, Harry._

 

* * *

 

(One cannot ascend to the surface too quickly. The pressures of the deepest water do peculiar things to the human body. He wants to see the sun again but the idea of freedom and lightness must be introduced slowly in order to avoid decompression sickness. Be careful of the air embolisms that form during the rapid rise, be wary of the nitrogen in the bloodstream as lethally sure as a bullet.)

Love is dangerous when it's offered by a hungry man. He is consumed by the need to have Harry awaken and reassure him, to slip those wiry tanned arms over his own shoulders. _Wake up._ Why is it more difficult to experience the fear of loss than the actual loss? Severus is used to having nothing, he is used to denial. But to have this man here in his bed, offering so much - it is unbearable. (Sometimes Severus says cutting things to stir Potter to anger, encourages him to leave and walk out the door and never return. _I don’t want you here. I never wanted you here. Just borrow someone else’s face and get the fuck out of here._ Sometimes he wants to take off himself, run out, change his name, change his face, change his life and disappear like John Hawthorne into the ether.)

 _Don’t leave._ (He has never wanted so much. It is insufferable.)

Harry does not wake. Severus considers him. He is the sum of his parts. He could catalog him, he thinks, two femurs, two ulnas, one mandible. Disarticulate the bones, take the man apart, down to his core. He is thirty-one and his skull has fused entirely. His pelvis is beginning to show signs of wear and someday, thousands of years from now, perhaps archaeologists will dig them up and read their story from these bones.

Harry stirs in his sleep. “Stop thinking,” he says, “I love you.”

“Wake up,” There’s nothing more, just those syllables that fall from his tongue. They both sense the fragility, the name fraught with meaning. Severus’ blood rushes with that old familiar battlecry, _Harry Harry Harry_. He tenses, afraid to speak further and break the cast spell. His hand catches the side of Harry’s heart-shaped face and the boy arches up into his touch and moans. Severus feels the wet heated breath on his skin. Harry presses his lips to the curve of Severus’ clavicles. Long hands wrap around his shoulders, tangle in his dark hair, and pull him down alongside Harry’s prone form. Down, down into the deep, into the sandy ocean bed where shipwrecks and carpet sharks burrow. _Down, I’m coming home._

“Stay,” he whispers into the warm skin beneath his lips. The green eyes widen. Severus knows instinctively that Harry understands everything unsaid, everything hidden behind that syllable. _Stay_ means _stay forever_. _Stay_ means _I love you_ and because Severus does not know how to love in measure, it is for the bones in Harry’s ears and for the ghastly sweaters, it is for the smell of his sweat and the morning breath and the way Harry cannot look at the sea without smiling.

Severus is not a religious man but he moves over Harry as a prayer. He splays his fingers over the wide span of Harry’s shoulder blades. His tongue swirls into the divot of the other man’s throat. Harry touches the sharp jut of his jaw and Severus’ eyes flutter closed as he focuses on pacing his breathing. “Harry,” he says, repeating the word like a rosary, “Harry, Harry.” He had never thought that he would be the one to break first but Harry’s name rises unchecked in his throat and spills into the bed with them. “ _Severus_ ,” Harry breathes as he nips at the soft space below Severus’ ear where his neck and jaw join. Hearing his name, he shudders with the pleasure that it spikes through him. _Say it, Harry, say my name. Say it again._ He needs to be something other than Professor, something other than Snape, something other than Death Eater. (He has not been _just Severus_ in a very long time.) His long fingers tremble slightly as he fumbles through the buttons on Harry’s shirt and Harry eases his hips up to allow Severus better access in untucking the fabric.

“God, I’ve dreamt about this for so long,” Harry moans and Severus feels another hot spike of arousal and for a moment is horribly sure that he will finish right there in his pants. He forces Harry’s hips to still with insistent hands, (long-fingered, wide-knuckled) the coal black eyes searching Harry’s own. “How long?” he asks in his wrecked, wretched voice, “How long have you wanted this?” (Severus will die if he does not know the answer.)

“Sixth year,” Harry is breathless and panting. That smile, that cursed smile. His fingers reach up and brush the long black and greyshot hair from Severus’ sweat-painted face. “I looked up at you in class and well…” he trails off. A grin appears on the beloved face, _you goddamn Cheshire cat_ , “That was a pretty confusing year for me, I gotta say.” Severus groans as Harry presses the palm of his hand against the aching hardness ( _Careful, I’ll go off like a bottle rocket._ ) between his legs. There is already a damp spot on his boxers as if his desire is leaking from him, too great to be contained. He wonders if there had been times, back then, when they had locked eyes during a heated row, each thinking the same thing?

_Would everything have gone differently?_

“I want-” Severus says, he does not know how to finish that sentence. “What do you want?” Harry breathes, “tell me.” It occurs to him that Harry does not make promises lightly. Harry is waiting for him with lips slightly parted, the glisten of sweat on his brow, his eyes blown with black-pupiled lust. _Tell me what you want. Ask me._ Severus can still hear the words. Harry is so patient, Severus would never have guessed. (Harry has learned patience in adulthood, as a man spent hiding.) He has never been eloquent when it was important. Either the timing was off or the words were all wrong, somehow everything was always so wrong when it came out from his mouth. He hates reaching for the vocabulary to explain things beyond him, these things that he does not know how to ask for nor articulate. How can he ask to take slices from Harry’s body and mount them clean and sterile (suspended in quieting solution) on a flat glass slide to study under a microscope? How can he ask to cut pieces from Harry with a scalpel, to preserve them in formaldehyde to keep pristine and perfect and never to lose them ever again? _Wrong. Not good._ Severus would not drink unicorn blood to keep himself alive but he has tinkered with potions made of it, he toys with the Dark Arts no longer out of fascination but desperation. He would do it to keep Harry alive. _Don’t say those things. Those are wrong._ He knows these are the thoughts of a monster but how can he love without consumption? He wants to unhook his jaw like a viper and swallow Harry whole. He is quiet and uncomfortable.

Harry seems to understand the stretching silence and Severus’ heaving chest, the way Severus’ dark eyes flick away toward the shadowed corners of the room. He stretches out one rough hand to the older man’s chin and fits their mouths together like puzzle pieces. (When Severus finally climaxes he loses all color and the world goes white behind his tightly-shut eyelids. He rides that pure pleasure - that intense nothingness, where no sound nor sight nor scent could reach him - until he doubles over around Harry, gently pushing the other’s stilled hand from the hypersensitive skin. His stomach still spasms slightly. In this moment he loses all eloquence and thinks _fuck fuck fuck god_.)

(He is drowning here in the deep. How far is he? He does not know, the bathometer is forgotten back on the ship. He knows Harry waits at the shore patiently. He does not know how to ascend, does not know how to make that great vertical exodus from the deep of indigo, cobalt, ultramarine. In the fathoms deep there is no light to guide him to the surface so Severus holds his breath and waits.)

 

* * *

 

The lake is very calm.

He stands up and gathers his things. In this distant town, he’s left the obvious wizarding accouterments behind and a small part of his mind wishes for the comfort of his simple black robe. Instead, he keeps his wand tucked like a talisman into the jacket's inner pocket. He pulls the black scarf tighter around his neck. (It is soft now and clean.)

Spinner’s End is at the end of the long row of council houses. The old structure howls with the dune winds, the aluminum siding whining and paint peeling off into the air. From the porch, he can see where the waves of Lake Knucklebone lap up to greet the shoreline, festooned with whitecaps and driftwood. Cokeworth is an old town, rebuilt on ancient roads and heel-dug paths. The original village and streetgrid had perished in the 14th century during the spread of the flea-ridden Black Death. Most of the town was modern, like his own dead-end street, built in the mid-twentieth-century. His parents had left trails of themselves in the house. Fingerprints. There were expired canned onions and codfish in the cupboards and a list of emergency phone numbers pasted to the inside of the pantry. _Police department, babysitters, poison control._ (He is quite sure that the phone numbers listed are all out of service.)

"I was born here,” Severus says. Harry is quiet. It was so rare for Severus to volunteer information, especially something personal. Harry takes Severus’ hand and fans his thumb across the blue-veined sallow skin. “This desolate, disgusting town of drunken louts and their equally insipid, disgusting families.” He hates so deeply the way Cokeworth cuts through his heart. He can feel the poverty of his childhood in his pores, he cannot scrub it clean no matter how many baths he takes, no matter how hot the water is, how corrosive the soap. “ _The boy is soft, he feels too much,_ ” his father had once said. Severus knows this is the loathsome truth still, forty years later. He has tried to burn it out of himself. “I hate this vile, godforsaken place.” He hates that all he has to offer to Harry is his hate, his disappointment (he does not think of the love that he now offers as much of a gift). He would like to wash his brain of the anger and the hate and start over. Harry deserves more, he has given him so much.

Harry presses his long torso against Severus’ back. “You don’t ever have to come back here,” he murmurs, “We can go wherever you want.” It is overwhelming. The possibility of something new and unknown terrifies him nearly more than staying. He has been writing this story for so long and does not know how to close the book.

He thinks of his pitch-eyed mother, who had pushed his hair back behind his ears. " _Never fall in love_ ," she had said. He thinks of his mother, thousands of feet below, deep within the pressurized waters. The water is black there at those depths. The creatures of those stygian depths (carp, suckers, horrific lampreys, perhaps Grendel himself) have rudimentary eyes that have never seen light beyond shades of navy and black. They live their lives by feel, sensing the rush of the water as their prey dart past to safety, the imminent pressure as something larger and darker looms. He knows that every old bone has been jostled by a hopeful bottom-feeder and the flesh scavenged. He knows that the local fishermen have pulled carp from the lake and have roasted them, packed with salt, and fed them to their families. He says nothing. He does not eat their food.

He slumps slightly and Harry rests his head on Severus’ shoulder. He can feel the languid heartbeat of the other man against his back beating a slow and steady promise. _Yes, take me away_ , he thinks. He does not know where they will go. It does not matter. Not if Harry is there, whole and sound. Harry, who still wakes up in the middle of the night with a haunted look in his eyes. Who turns to Severus and seeing his body still there, goes still and calm beneath the sheets. They lock eyes in the dark with understanding. (Harry curls his arm around Severus and goes back to sleep with even breathing, Severus falls asleep for the first time that night.)

“Where would we go?” he asks.

“Ida sent word that the Hall is nearly rebuilt,” Harry says, his eyes look off over the horizon, full of galaxies. Severus picks a point somewhere in his left iris, the North Star, (Polaris, his polestar, which has guided him all this time.) and focuses on it. “But we don’t have to. We have resources, my Gringotts vault is still half-full. We can go anywhere.” There is a sort of relaxed set to Harry’s jaw that he has not seen since the man was eleven years old. “We don’t have to answer to anyone. No one needs us.” He focuses on Severus with bright eyes. (Those eyes that he had imagined so many times, how had he always gotten them wrong? They are far warmer than he had remembered. He wonders if the flecks of hazel and gold had always been there or if they had snuck in during that lost decade. Age looks good on Harry, he wears it well.) He is breathless under that gaze.

Among all the other debris, you can reinvent yourself. _Flotsam und jetsam_. The lighthouse juts out into the lake like a hipbone. The waves break, the sky settles into rose and marine. In his pockets, he puts his penknife, foreign coins, little treasures. He cuts the labels out from his clothing. At the shore, the silica sand squeaks beneath his feet. _I am come from the lake and here to return. Hello Grendel, hello monster._ The waves curl about his feet and Harry’s tanned hand slips into his own. _Down we go, to Lake Knucklebone._ Harry is smiling and he feels his own face gentle. He does not smile, (he never will) it does not come easily to him. He is an old man with old habits but Harry knows this and he loves him anyway. Harry tucks his face in and whispers into Severus’ ear, “Come on, there’s a curry recipe I want to try tonight. Let’s go home, love.”  
  
_Home_. It does not matter that they will go back to Spinner’s End tonight because they will go there together. His heart fills and he closes his eyes to buffet the swells. He swallows and nods, his hand squeezing the fingers threaded through his own. This is not the moment where he realizes that he is in love with Harry Potter. This is not even the moment where he (finally) admits it to himself. This is the moment where he knows that he is loved, that _Harry_ loves him. It is not the epilogue he had expected and he is terrified. He locks eyes with the other man, twin coals alight to those smiling depths (green as bottle flies) and opens his mouth to say _I love you_. His mother’s voice rises and tries to crawl out of his mouth, whispering the same in her own soft tongue. _Te iubesc_. Nothing comes out.  
  
Harry smiles and touches his fingertips to the rough stubble of Severus’ cheek. “Yeah, I know,” he says. Severus knows he knows. He feels Harry’s heart twinned around his own, like to like, similar in ache and rot and each burned clean with love. They are the cleared forest after a fire. Capricorn, Leo. That old story.  
  
(Severus can see the glimmer of light appear in the blue. The shades are different here in the epipelagic layer and he trails teal and azure and turquoise through his fingers. Sound breaks through to him like waves and he can nearly reach for Harry’s hand, there standing on the shore.)  
  
He looks at Harry, the once and the future king who was reborn. The shore is close here. The riptide has gone. He holds his breath, kicks against the ocean floor, and surfaces.

 

Art by likelightinglass.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Ghost Story_ owes its life to several things (beyond Harry Potter). The first, and most clear, is Jane Eyre from which I have gratuitously borrowed many things (not the least of all being the entire plot). Additionally, I drew inspiration from professorfangirl's _In The Deep_ and her use of _Praya dubia_ and other deep sea imagery. I also was inspired in the very first place by Toft's _Three Months _and linoresearch's incredible Jane Eyre/Destiel mashup, _The Ghosts of Blackthorn Hall_. And to mia_ugly's _Rapture_ , which inspired me to start writing and asked how we should tell these tales. Also to all the authors I have referenced and drawn from shamelessly - David Foster Wallace, Anne Carson, Anne Sexton, John Gardner, T.S. Eliot and so on - thank you.__


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